On the Development of Parallel Linear Solvers for Simulations of Reactor Thermalhydraulics

Abstract

The state-of-the-art multiphase fluid dynamics code, NPHASE-CMFD, performs multiphase flow simulations in complex domains using implicit nonlinear treatment of the governing equations and in parallel, which is a very challenging environment for the linear solver. The present work illustrates how the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) and scalable Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) preconditioner from Hypre can be utilized to construct robust and scalable linear solvers for the Newton correction equation obtained from the discretized system of governing conservation equations in NPHASE-CMFD. The overall long-tem objective of this work is to extend the NPHASE-CMFD code into a fully-scalable solver of multiphase flow and heat transfer problems, applicable to both steady-state and stiff time-dependent phenomena in complete fuel assemblies of nuclear reactors and, eventually, the entire reactor core (such as the Virtual Reactor concept envisioned by CASL). This campaign appropriately begins with the linear algebraic equation solver, which is traditionally a bottleneck to scalability in PDE-based codes. The computational complexity of the solver is usually superlinear in problem size, whereas the rest of the code, the “physics” portion, usually has its complexity linear in the problem size.