Termination of Picard Iteration for Coupled Neutronics/Thermal-Hydraulics Simulations

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the coupled N/TH problem, in which the termination criterion for the neutronics iteration adopts an adaptive tolerance with respect to the fuel temperature residual at each Picard iteration. We refer to this coupling scheme as the inexact Picard iteration method. Fourier analysis is performed to investigate how the convergence behavior of Picard iteration is influenced by the inexact neutronics solution. It is found that if the convergence of the inner neutronics iteration is slow, Picard coupling may become unstable unless a tighter tolerance is used for the neutronics iteration. Nevertheless, our analysis indicates that a certain amount of over-solving is necessary for maintaining the stability of Picard iteration if the iterative solution of the subproblem is not fast enough. However, this issue has not been addressed in the previous studies.