Section: New Results

Domain decomposition methods

Transparent boundary conditions with overlap in unbounded anisotropic media

Participants : Anne-Sophie Bonnet-Ben Dhia, Sonia Fliss, Yohanes Tjandrawidjaja.

This work is done in the framework of the PhD of Yohanes Tjandrawidjaja, funded by CEA-LIST, in collaboration with Vahan Baronian form CEA. This follows the PhD of Antoine Tonnoir (now Assistant Professor at Insa of Rouen) who developed a new approach, the Half-Space Matching Method, to solve scattering problems in 2D unbounded anisotropic media. The objective is to extend the method to a 3D plate of finite width.

In 2D, our approach consists in coupling several plane-waves representations of the solution in half-spaces surrounding the defect with a FE computation of the solution around the defect. The difficulty is to ensure that all these representations match, in particular in the infinite intersections of the half-spaces. It leads to a Fredholm formulation which couples, via integral operators, the solution in a bounded domain including the defect and some traces of the solution on the edge of the half-planes.

The extension to 3D elastic plates requires some generalizations of the formulation which are not obvious. In particular, we have to use Neumann traces of the solution, which raises difficult theoretical questions.

As a first step, we have considered a scattering problem outside a convex polygonal scatterer for a general class of boundary conditions, using the Half-Space Matching Method. Using the Mellin Transform, we are able to show that this system is coercive + compact in presence of dissipation.

Let us mention that the Half-Space Matching Method has been extended successfully by Julian Ott (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie) to the scattering by junctions of open waveguides in 2D.

Domain Decomposition Methods for the neutron diffusion equation

Participants : Patrick Ciarlet, Léandre Giret.

This work is done in collaboration with Erell Jamelot (CEA-DEN, Saclay) and Félix Kpadonou (LMV, UVSQ). Studying numerically the steady state of a nuclear core reactor is expensive, in terms of memory storage and computational time. In its simplest form, one must solve a neutron diffusion equation with low-regularity solutions, discretized by mixed finite element techniques, within a loop. Iterating in this loop allows to compute the smallest eigenvalue of the system, which determines the critical, or non-critical, state of the core. This problem fits within the framework of high performance computing so, in order both to optimize the memory storage and to reduce the computational time, one can use a domain decomposition method, which is then implemented on a parallel computer: this is the strategy used for the APOLLO3 neutronics code. The development of non-conforming DD methods for the neutron diffusion equation with low-regularity solutions has recently been finalized, cf. [PC,EJ,FK'1x]. The theory for the eigenvalue problem is also understood. The current research now focuses on the numerical analysis of the full suite of algorithms to prove convergence for the complete multigroup SPN model (which involves coupled diffusion equations).