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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.
J. B. Yasinsky, L. R. Foulke
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 44 | Number 1 | April 1971 | Pages 72-85
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A18907
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is shown that the use of the standard spatial-differencing method when applied to space-time diffusion problems arising as the materials within a reactor are displaced can result in solutions which display a nonphysical time dependence. This irregular time dependence occurs when the spatial mesh and timestep are such that it takes several time steps for a movable material interface to move between two spatial meshpoints. New spatial difference equations, based on a specified piecewise polynomial flux behavior between meshpoints, are developed for the space-time group diffusion equations. Numerical studies show that these new difference equations eliminate the nonphysical time dependence of the solution for movable material problems. In addition, it is shown that for such problems the solutions resulting from the new difference equations are almost as accurate as solutions obtained using the standard difference equations with a much finer spatial mesh.