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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
Yaqi Wang, Jean C. Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 145-166
Technical Paper | dx.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.