Regular Article

Application of multiphysics model order reduction to doppler/neutronic feedback

¹ Texas A&M University, Department of Nuclear Engineering, College Station, TX 77840, USA
² Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory of Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour, PH D3 465 (Batiment PH), Station 3, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

^* e-mail: jean.ragusa@tamu.edu

Received: 19 May 2019
Received in final form: 26 September 2019
Accepted: 27 September 2019
Published online: 14 November 2019

Abstract

In this paper, a proper orthogonal decomposition based reduced-order model is presented for parametrized multiphysics computations. Our application physics is Doppler feedback in a simplified model of the molten salt fast reactor concept. The reduced model is created using the method of snapshots where the offline training set is obtained by exercising a full-order model created with the OpenFOAM based multiphysics solver, GeN-Foam. The steady state models solve the multi-group diffusion k-eigenvalue equations with moving precursors together with the energy equation. A fixed velocity field is assumed throughout the computations, hence the momentum and continuity equations are not solved. The discrete empirical interpolation method is used for the efficient coupling of the ROM solvers, while the input parameter space is surveyed using the improved distributed latin hypercube sampling algorithm.