Annals of Nuclear Energy, Vol 56, pp. 194-207
The method and performance of a finite element method based simplified P3 code developed for generalized geometry applications are presented. The code takes the mesh data produced by an external generalpurpose mesh generator. The weighted residual method with Galerkin weighting is directly applied to the two SP3 equations which were slightly modified to attain symmetry. The linear system for the global problem involving two unknown flux moments per node is obtained by summing up the elementwise weighted residual equations. The solution accuracy is examined for a suite of benchmark problems consisting of typical thermal and fast reactor problems together with the comparisons against the corresponding diffusion theory solutions. The effectiveness f the quadratic basis function is assessed as well against the linear function. It is demonstrated that the SP3 formulation is particularly beneficial for fast neutron systems.
