A Comparative Analysis of Neutron Transport Calculations Based on Variational Formulation and Finite Element Approaches
- Resource Type
- article
- Authors
- Khashayar Sadeghi; Seyed Hadi Ghazaie; Ekaterina Sokolova; Ahmad Zolfaghari; Mohammad Reza Abbasi
- Source
- Energies, Vol 13, Iss 20, p 5424 (2020)
- Subject
- neutron transport equation
comprehensive comparative analysis
continuous finite element
discontinuous finite element
conjoint variational principle
spatially adaptive approach
Technology
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 1996-1073
The application of continuous and discontinuous approaches of the finite element method (FEM) to the neutron transport equation (NTE) has been investigated. A comparative algorithm for analyzing the capability of various types of numerical solutions to the NTE based on variational formulation and discontinuous finite element method (DFEM) has been developed. The developed module is coupled to the program discontinuous finite element method for neutron (DISFENT). Each variational principle (VP) is applied to an example with drastic changes in the distribution of neutron flux density, and the obtained results of the continuous and discontinuous finite element (DFE) have been compared. The comparison between the level of accuracy of each approach using new module of DISFENT program has been performed based on the fine mesh solutions of the multi-PN (MPN) approximation. The obtained results of conjoint principles (CPs) have been demonstrated to be very accurate in comparison to other VPs. The reduction in the number of required meshes for solving the problem is considered as the main advantage of this principle. Finally, the spatial additivity to the context of the spherical harmonics has been implemented to the CP, to avoid from computational error accumulation.