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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Hyunsuk Lee, Sooyoung Choi, Deokjung Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 1 | May 2015 | Pages 69-85
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper proposes a new hybrid method combining the Monte Carlo (MC) method and the Method of Characteristics (MOC). The hybrid method employs MC and MOC together to solve a neutron transport problem. The two different methods are applied to different neutron energy ranges. The MC method is used to obtain accurate solutions in the resonance energy range, and the MOC is used for high and low neutron energy ranges to achieve high performance of the new method. The two methods are consistently coupled through scattering and fission source terms during the power iterations and group sweepings. Numerical tests with a model problem confirm that the hybrid method can produce a more accurate solution than a conventional MOC by a factor of 10 and much higher computational efficiency than a conventional MC method by a factor of 90.