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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.
Peter D. Esser, Robert J. Witt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 1 | May 1993 | Pages 20-35
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE93-A24011
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An upwind nodal solution method is developed for the steady, two-dimensional flow of an incompressible fluid. The formulation is based on the nodal integral method, which uses transverse integrations, analytical solutions of the one-dimensional averaged equations, and node-averaged uniqueness constraints to derive the discretized nodal equations. The derivation introduces an exponential upwind bias by retaining the streamwise convection term in the homogeneous part of the transverse-integrated convection-diffusion equation. The method is adapted to the stream function-vorticity form of the Navier-Stokes equations, which are solved over a nonstaggered nodal mesh. A special nodal scheme is used for the Poisson stream function equation to properly account for the exponentially varying vorticity source. Rigorous expressions for the velocity components and the no-slip vorticity boundary condition are derived from the stream function formulation.The method is validated with several benchmark problems. An idealized purely convective flow of a scalar step function indicates that the nodal approximation errors are primarily dispersive, not dissipative, in nature. Results for idealized and actual recirculating driven-cavity flows reveal a significant reduction in false diffusion compared with conventional finite difference techniques.