BPLU Completion and Verification Report

The Border Profile LU (BPLU) linear equation solver is the default solver for newer versions of RELAP5-3D. It can significantly reduce execution time compared to the previous default solver, MA18. Particularly for 3D cases, it can reduce run time by one to two orders of magnitude over MA18. However, because of some user reported failures, the MA18 solver currently must be used for coupled analyses. Over one dozen User Problems (UP) have been reported between 1999 and 2011 that involve the BPLU solver in RELAP5-3D. These issues can be combined into two categories of problems with the solver: • It fails when running multidimensional components with the nearly-implicit hydrodynamics advancement scheme. • It fails with some input models where the MA18 sparse solver does not fail. The sources of these UP have been found and corrected. The modified coding has been thoroughly tested with over 3000 test cases and on two different compute platforms. The updates are incorporated in RELAP5-3D, version 3.0.2.