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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.
J. E. Morel, T. A. Wareing, R. B. Lowrie, D. K. Parsons
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 144 | Number 1 | May 2003 | Pages 1-22
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We analyze three ray-effect mitigation techniques in two-dimensional x-y geometry. In particular, two angular finite element methods, and the modulated P1-equivalent S2 method, are analyzed. It is found that these techniques give varying levels of ray-effect mitigation on certain traditional test problems, but all of them yield discrete-ray solutions for a line source in a void. In general, it is shown that any transport angular discretization technique that results in a hyperbolic approximation for the directional gradient operator will yield a discrete-ray solution for a line source in a void. Since the directional gradient operator is in fact hyperbolic, it is not surprising that many discretizations of the operator retain this property. For instance, our results suggest that both continuous and discontinuous angular finite element methods produce hyperbolic approximations. Our main conclusion is that the effectiveness of any hyperbolic ray-effect mitigation technique will necessarily be highly problem dependent. In particular, such techniques must fail in problems that have the most severe ray effects, i.e., those that are "similar" to a line source in a void.