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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Madalina C. Badea, Dan G. Cacuci, Aurelian F. Badea
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 1 | September 2012 | Pages 1-19
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work applies a recently developed best-estimate data assimilation and model calibration methodology to the three-dimensional reactor thermal-hydraulics simulation and design tool FLICA4. The experimental information used for calibrating FLICA4 parameters stems from the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Regulatory Commission boiling water reactor full-size fine-mesh bundle tests (BFBT) benchmarks, which were designed by the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation of Japan for enabling systematic validation of simulation tools using full-scale experimental data. The following specific BFBT experiments have been used in this work for calibrating parameters and boundary conditions for FLICA4: (a) axial void fraction distributions and (b) transversal void fraction distributions. The resulting uncertainties for the predicted parameters and distributions of pressure drops and void fractions are shown to be smaller than the a priori experimental and computed uncertainties, thus demonstrating the successful calibration of a large-scale reactor core thermal-hydraulics code using the BFBT benchmark-grade experiments.