Sensitivity Analysis of the Galerkin Finite Element Method Neutron Diffusion Solver to the Shape of the Elements

The purpose of the present study is the presentation of the appropriate element and shape function in the solution of the neutron diffusion equation in two-dimensional (2D) geometries. To this end, the multigroup neutron diffusion equation is solved using the Galerkin finite element method in both rectangular and hexagonal reactor cores. The spatial discretization of the equation is performed using unstructured triangular and quadrilateral finite elements. Calculations are performed using both linear and quadratic approximations of shape function in the Galerkin finite element method, based on which results are compared. Using the power iteration method, the neutron flux distributions with the corresponding eigenvalue are obtained. The results are then validated against the valid results for IAEA-2D and BIBLIS-2D benchmark problems. To investigate the dependency of the results to the type and number of the elements, and shape function order, a sensitivity analysis of the calculations to the mentioned parameters is performed. It is shown that the triangular elements and second order of the shape function in each element give the best results in comparison to the other states.