A COARSE-MESH DIFFUSION SYNTHETIC ACCELERATION OF THE SOURCE ITERATION SCHEME FOR ONE-SPEED DISCRETE ORDINATES TRANSPORT CALCULATIONS IN SLAB GEOMETRY

The scattering source iterative (SI) scheme is traditionally applied to converge fine-mesh numerical solutions to fixed-source discrete ordinates ( ) neutron transport problems. The SI scheme is very simple to implement under a computational viewpoint. However, the SI scheme may show very slow convergence rate, mainly for diffusive media (low absorption) with several mean free paths in extent. In this work we describe an acceleration technique based on an improved initial guess for the scattering source distribution within the slab. In other words, we use as initial guess for the fine-mesh scattering source, the coarse-mesh solution of the neutron diffusion equation with special boundary conditions to account for the classical prescribed boundary conditions, including vacuum boundary conditions. Therefore, we first implement a spectral nodal method that generates coarse-mesh diffusion solution that is completely free from spatial truncation errors, then we reconstruct this coarse-mesh solution within each spatial cell of the discretization grid, to further yield the initial guess for the fine-mesh scattering source in the first transport sweep (μm > 0 and μm < 0, m = 1:N) across the spatial grid. We consider a number of numerical experiments to illustrate the efficiency of the offered diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) technique.