Two-Dimensional Space-Time Kinetics Benchmarks

Abstract

The numerical methods used to solve the space-time kinetics equations can be broadly divided into two categories knowasn direct and indirect solution methods. In this paper, onemethod of each category has been selected and used to solve sane typical benchmark problems. In the direct category, the alternating direction explicit method was chosen. For this, the well-known computer code ADEP was modified to include the non-symmetric scheme. Using three test cases, it has been established that the non-symmetsrcihceme is superior to the scheme used in ADEP. In the indirect category the adiabatic approach was selected. Two benchmark problems typical for a thermal and fast reactor, were analysed using this method. For the thennal reactor benchnark the effect of number of mesh points and the convergence criteria used for flux and eigenvalue convergence on the results has been studied. It is concluded that the results do depend on both these parameters, although they are somewhatmore sensitive to the number of mesh points. For both the benchmarks the results using the adiabatic scheme are in good agreement with the results obtained using other methods.