Reduced basis approach for modeling the movement of nuclear reactor control rods

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.