First-Order Comprehensive Adjoint Method for Computing Operator-Valued Response Sensitivities to Imprecisely Known Parameters, Internal Interfaces and Boundaries of Coupled Nonlinear Systems: II. Application to a Nuclear Reactor Heat Removal Benchmark

Abstract

This work illustrates the application of a comprehensive first-order adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology (1st-CASAM) to a heat conduction and convection analytical benchmark problem which simulates heat removal from a nuclear reactor fuel rod. This analytical benchmark problem can be used to verify the accuracy of numerical solutions provided by software modeling heat transport and fluid flow systems. This illustrative heat transport benchmark shows that collocation methods require one adjoint computation for every collocation point while spectral expansion methods require one adjoint computation for each cardinal function appearing in the respective expansion when recursion relations cannot be developed between the corresponding adjoint functions. However, it is also shown that spectral methods are much more efficient when recursion relations provided by orthogonal polynomials make it possible to develop recursion relations for computing the corresponding adjoint functions. When recursion relations cannot be developed for the adjoint functions, the collocation method is probably more efficient than the spectral expansion method, since the sources for the corresponding adjoint systems are just Dirac delta functions (which makes the respective computation equivalent to the computation of a Green’s function), rather than the more elaborated sources involving high-order Fourier basis functions or orthogonal polynomials. For systems involving many independent variables, it is likely that a hybrid combination of spectral expansions in some independent variables and collocation in the remaining independent variables would provide the most efficient computational outcome.