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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
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.