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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
Haluk Utku, John M. Christenson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 116 | Number 1 | January 1994 | Pages 55-66
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A21481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The temporal subdomain method (TSM), based on a spatial finite element formulation, is investigated as a method for the solution of the space-time-dependent multigroup neutron dynamics equations. The spatial aspect of the problem was formulated as an array of finite elements by using a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system subdivided into contiguous triangular elements. Within each element and within each neutron group, the flux was represented by a linear polynomial. Numerical experiments using a computer program developed during the course of the investigation demonstrated that the method is straightforward to implement and that it produces stable calculations for a wide range of time steps. The stability of the method has been tested for sinusoidal, ramp, and step-change reactivity insertions. The results show that the TSM outperforms most alternating direction implicit methods in the sense that a similar degree of accuracy can be achieved with larger time steps using the same number of nodes. System condition number calculations as a function of node number were also carried out for a series of static eigenvalue calculations to determine the likelihood of error propagation and the difficulty of inverting the global system matrices during the time-dependent calculations.