Development of a new two-dimensional Cartesian geometry nodal multigroup discrete-ordinates method

Abstract

The purpose of this work is the development and testing of a new family of methods for calculating the spatial dependence of the neutron density in nuclear systems described in two-dimensional Cartesian geometry. The energy and angular dependence of the neutron density is approximated using the multigroup and discrete ordinates techniques, respectively. The resulting FORTRAN computer code is designed to handle an arbitrary number of spatial, energy, and angle subdivisions. Any degree of scattering anisotropy can be handled by the code for either external source or fission systems. The basic approach is to (1) approximate the spatial variation of the neutron source across each spatial subdivision as an expansion in terms of a user-supplied set of exponential basis functions; (2) solve analytically for the resulting neutron density inside each region; and (3) approximate this density in the basis function space in order to calculate the next iteration flux-dependent source terms. In the general case the calculation is iterative due to neutron sources which depend on the neutron density itself, such as scattering interactions.