Solution of algebraic problems arising in nuclear reactor core simulations using Jacobi-Davidson and Multigrid methods

The solution of large and sparse eigenvalue problems arising from the discretization of the diffusion equation is considered. The multigroup diffusion equation is discretized by means of the Nodal expansion Method (NEM) [9, 10]. A new formulation of the higher order NEM variants revealing the true n...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Havet, Maxime M
Other Authors: Notay, Yvan
Format: Others
Language:en
Published: Universite Libre de Bruxelles 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://theses.ulb.ac.be/ETD-db/collection/available/ULBetd-10092008-192938/
Description
Summary:The solution of large and sparse eigenvalue problems arising from the discretization of the diffusion equation is considered. The multigroup diffusion equation is discretized by means of the Nodal expansion Method (NEM) [9, 10]. A new formulation of the higher order NEM variants revealing the true nature of the problem, that is, a generalized eigenvalue problem, is proposed. These generalized eigenvalue problems are solved using the Jacobi-Davidson (JD) method [26]. The most expensive part of the method consists of solving a linear system referred to as correction equation. It is solved using Krylov subspace methods in combination with aggregation-based Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) techniques. In that context, a particular aggregation technique used in combination with classical smoothers, referred to as oblique geometric coarsening, has been derived. Its particularity is that it aggregates unknowns that are not coupled, which has never been done to our knowledge. A modular code, combining JD with an AMG preconditioner, has been developed. The code comes with many options, that have been tested. In particular, the instability of the Rayleigh-Ritz [33] acceleration procedure in the non-symmetric case has been underlined. Our code has also been compared to an industrial code extracted from ARTEMIS.