High performance 3D pin-by-pin neutron diffusion calculation based on 2D/1D decoupling method for accurate pin power estimation

The methods and performance of a 3D pin-by-pin neutronics code based on the 2D/1D decoupling method are presented. The code was newly developed as an effort to achieve enhanced accuracy and high calculation performance that are sufficient for the use in practical nuclear design analyses. From the 3D diffusion-based finite difference method (FDM) formulation, decoupled planar formulations are established by treating pre-determined axial leakage as a source term. The decoupled axial problems are formulated with the radial leakage source term. To accelerate the pin-by-pin calculation, the two-level coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) formulation, which consists of the multigroup node-wise CMFD and the two-group assembly-wise CMFD is implemented. To enhance the accuracy, both the discontinuity factor method and the super-homogenization (SPH) factor method are examined for pin-wise cross-section homogenization. The parallelization is achieved with the OpenMP package. The accuracy and performance of the pin-by-pin calculations are assessed with the VERA and APR1400 benchmark problems. It is demonstrated that pin-by-pin 2D/1D alternating calculations within the two-level 3D CMFD framework yield accurate solutions in about 30 s for the typical commercial core problems, on a parallel platform employing 32 threads.