Verification of Multiphysics software: Space and time convergence studies for nonlinearly coupled applications

High-fidelity modeling of nuclear reactors requires the solution of a nonlinear coupled multi-physics stiff problem with widely varying time and length scales that need to be resolved correctly. A numerical method that converges the implicit nonlinear terms to a small tolerance is often referred to as nonlinearly consistent (or tightly coupled). This nonlinear consistency is still lacking in the vast majority of coupling techniques today. We present a tightly coupled multiphysics framework that tackles this issue and present code-verification and convergence analyses in space and time for several models of nonlinear coupled physics