Numerical optimization of a multiphysics calculation scheme

This work concerns the numerical optimization of a multiphysics calculation scheme. The considered application is a 5x5 Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) assemblies mini-core surrounded by radial and axial reflectors. The scenario adopted for the analysis is steady-state nominal conditions and fission products set to the equilibrium concentration. The neutronics is modelled at the pin-cell scale and the thermal-hydraulics at the subchannel level. Depending on the scenario, the damped fixed-point algorithm might not be sufficiently robust or efficient enough. For this reason, a technique based on the partial convergence of the solvers is tested. In every multiphysic iteration, a maximum number of iterations is imposed for both the neutronics and the thermal-hydraulics solvers. In combination with that, the solver restarts from the results of the last calculation. In this way, if the method is convergent, the initialization progresses towards the fixed-point solution. The results show that such a technique improves both the robustness and the speed of the algorithm. Within this approach, the range of relaxation factors that makes the algorithm converge is significantly broadened and the importance of this parameter on the global performance is reduced. The computing time also decreases by a factor between 10 and 20. Furthermore, this gain does not strongly depend on the exact imposed maximum number of iterations. Some preliminary observations are also reported in respect with the application of such a technique to the Anderson acceleration method.