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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.
Daniel F. Gill, Yousry Y. Azmy
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 167 | Number 2 | February 2011 | Pages 141-153
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-98
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present an approach to the k-eigenvalue problem in multigroup diffusion theory based on a nonlinear treatment of the generalized eigenvalue problem. A nonlinear function is posed whose roots are equal to solutions of the k-eigenvalue problem; a Newton-Krylov method is used to find these roots. The Jacobian-vector product is found exactly or by using the Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) approximation. Several preconditioners for the Krylov iteration are developed. These preconditioners are based on simple approximations to the Jacobian, with one special instance being the use of power iteration as a preconditioner. Using power iteration as a preconditioner allows for the Newton-Krylov approach to heavily leverage existing power method implementations in production codes. When applied as a left preconditioner, any existing power iteration can be used to form the kernel of a JFNK solution to the k-eigenvalue problem. Numerical results generated for a suite of two-dimensional reactor benchmarks show the feasibility and computational benefits of the Newton formulation as well as examine some of the numerical difficulties potentially encountered with Newton-Krylov methods. The performance of the method is also seen to be relatively insensitive to the dominance ratio for a one-dimensional slab problem.