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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
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.