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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.
Mary E. Ward, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 95 | Number 1 | January 1987 | Pages 47-59
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A20431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A singular perturbation method for the analysis of large power oscillations in nuclear reactors is applied to obtain phase-plane solutions of the Ergen- Weinberg model. The system equations, recast in an appropriate form, directly give a first approximation to the closed trajectory in which the system behavior is idealized as relaxation oscillations. Further approximations in the phase plane are determined using separate perturbation series on individual parts of the oscillation, with variations in the assignment of dependent and independent variables to consistently obtain convergent series. The accuracy of each order of the phase-plane solution increases with the magnitude of the power pulse in the actual physical situation. For realistic reactor conditions, both the trajectory and period of oscillation are well predicted using the first two terms of each perturbation series.