ACCELERATION OF A 2-DIMENSIONAL, 2-ENERGY GROUP NEUTRON NOISE SOLVER BASED ON A DISCRETE ORDINATES METHOD IN THE FREQUENCY DOMAIN

The acceleration of the convergence rate is studied for a neutron transport solver to simulate 2-D, 2-energy-group neutron noise problems in the frequency domain. The Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (CMFD) method is compared to the Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration (DSA) method. Numerical tests are performed using heterogeneous system configurations with different boundary conditions. The CMFD scheme leads to a better convergence rate. The results also show that CMFD can accelerate neutron noise problems in a wide range of perturbation frequencies with almost equal efficiency. An unstable convergence behavior is nevertheless observed in problems with purely reflective boundary conditions. Stabilization techniques such as performing multiple transport sweeps, underrelaxing the flux update, and using the lpCMFD method are investigated and improvements can be obtained.