Cell Based CMFD Formulation for Acceleration of Whole-core Method of Characteristics Calculations

This Paper is to apply the well-established coarse mesh finite difference(CMFD) method to the method of characteristics(MOC) transport calculation as an acceleration scheme. The CMFD problem is first formulated at the pin-cell level with the multi-group structure To solve the cell- based multi-group CMFD problem efficiently, a two-group CMFD formulation is also derived from the multi-group CMFD formulation. The performance of the CMFD acceleration is examined for three test problems with different sizes including a realistic quarter core PWR problem. The CMFD formulation provides a significant reduction in the number of ray tracings and thus only about 9 ray tracing iterations are enough for the realistic problem. In computing time, the CMFD accelerated case is about two or three times faster than the coarse-mesh rebalancing(CMR) accelerated case.