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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
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Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Yaqi Wang, Jean C. Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 145-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-46
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) schemes compatible with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) grids are derived for the SN transport equations discretized using high-order discontinuous finite elements. These schemes are directly obtained from the discretized transport equations by assuming a linear dependence in angle of the angular flux along with an exact Fick's law and, therefore, are categorized as partially consistent. These schemes are akin to the symmetric interior penalty technique applied to elliptic problems and are all based on a second-order discontinuous finite element discretization of a diffusion equation (as opposed to a mixed or P1 formulation). Therefore, they only have the scalar flux as unknowns. A Fourier analysis has been carried out to determine the convergence properties of the three proposed DSA schemes for various cell optical thicknesses and aspect ratios. Out of the three DSA schemes derived, the modified interior penalty (MIP) scheme is stable and effective for realistic problems, even with distorted elements, but loses effectiveness for some highly heterogeneous configurations. The MIP scheme is also symmetric positive definite and can be solved efficiently with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method. Its implementation in an AMR SN transport code has been performed for both source iteration and GMRes-based transport solves, with polynomial orders up to 4. Numerical results are provided and show good agreement with the Fourier analysis results. Results on AMR grids demonstrate that the cost of DSA can be kept low on locally refined meshes.