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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.
Petri Kotiluoto
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 3 | July 2001 | Pages 269-278
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2213
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculation of neutron flux in three-dimensions is a complex problem. A novel approach for solving complicated neutron transport problems is presented, based on the tree multigrid technique and the Simplified P3 (SP3) approximation. Discretization of the second-order elliptic SP3 equations is performed for a regular three-dimensional octree grid by using an integrated scheme. The octree grid is generated directly from STL files, which can be exported from practically all computer-aided design-systems. Marshak-like boundary conditions are utilized. Iterative algorithms are constructed for SP3 approximation with simple coarse-to-fine prolongation and fine-to-coarse restriction operations of the tree multigrid technique. Numerical results are presented for a simple cylindrical homogeneous one-group test case and for a simplistic two-group pressurized water reactor pressure vessel fluence calculation benchmark. In the former homogeneous test case, a very good agreement with 1.6% maximal deviation compared with DORT results was obtained. In the latter test case, however, notable discrepancies were observed. These comparisons show that the tree multigrid technique is capable of solving three-dimensional neutron transport problems with a very low computational cost, but that the SP3 approximation itself is not satisfactory for all problems. However, the tree multigrid technique is a very promising new method for neutron transport.