hp-Adaptive discontinuous Galerkin methods for neutron transport criticality problems

In this article we consider the application of high-order/hp-version adaptive discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (DGFEMs) for the discretization of the keff-eigenvalue problem associated with the neutron transport equation. To this end, we exploit the dual weighted residual approach to de...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hall, Edward, Houston, Paul, Murphy, Steven
Format: Article
Published: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 2017
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Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43702/
Description
Summary:In this article we consider the application of high-order/hp-version adaptive discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods (DGFEMs) for the discretization of the keff-eigenvalue problem associated with the neutron transport equation. To this end, we exploit the dual weighted residual approach to derive a reliable and efficient a posteriori error estimate for the computed critical value of keff. Moreover, by exploiting the underlying block structure of the hp-version DGFEM, we propose and implement an efficient numerical solver based on exploiting Tarjan's strongly connected components algorithm to compute the inverse of the underlying transport operator; this is then utilised as an efficient preconditioner for the keff-eigenvalue problem. Finally, on the basis of the derived a posteriori error estimator we propose an hp-adaptive refinement algorithm which automatically refines both the angular and spatial domains. The performance of this adaptive strategy is demonstrated on a series of multi-energetic industrial benchmark problems. In particular, we highlight the computational advantages of employing hp-refinement for neutron transport criticality problems in comparison with standard low-order h-refinement techniques.