TY - JOUR T1 - A Reduced Basis Approach for Modeling the Movement of Nuclear Reactor Control Rods JF - NERS-14-1062; ASME J of Nuclear Rad Sci, 2, 2 (2016) 021019 Y1 - 2016 A1 - Alberto Sartori A1 - Antonio Cammi A1 - Lelio Luzzi A1 - Gianluigi Rozza AB - This work presents a reduced order model (ROM) aimed at simulating nuclear reactor control rods movement and featuring fast-running prediction of reactivity and neutron flux distribution as well. In particular, the reduced basis (RB) method (built upon a high-fidelity finite element (FE) approximation) has been employed. The neutronics has been modeled according to a parametrized stationary version of the multigroup neutron diffusion equation, which can be formulated as a generalized eigenvalue problem. Within the RB framework, the centroidal Voronoi tessellation is employed as a sampling technique due to the possibility of a hierarchical parameter space exploration, without relying on a “classical” a posteriori error estimation, and saving an important amount of computational time in the offline phase. Here, the proposed ROM is capable of correctly predicting, with respect to the high-fidelity FE approximation, both the reactivity and neutron flux shape. In this way, a computational speedup of at least three orders of magnitude is achieved. If a higher precision is required, the number of employed basis functions (BFs) must be increased. PB - ASME VL - 2 UR - http://urania.sissa.it/xmlui/handle/1963/35192 IS - 2 N1 - 8 pages U1 - 35473 U2 - Mathematics U4 - 1 ER -