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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.
K. L. Thomsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 3 | March 1995 | Pages 167-174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coupled collision probability and interface-current equations in the flat-flux, isotropic approximation are implemented in a light water reactor (LWR) lattice code that is under development. By using traditional Gaussian elimination of the subregion fluxes of the cells, the interface-current equations are turned into a nodal form. In the transformed flux and current equations, expressed in terms of response matrix theory, the coefficients become multiple-flight probabilities, which obey analogous conservation and reciprocity relations as the first-flight probabilities. The convergence of the iterative solution for the interface currents is accelerated by successive overrelaxation (SOR) and global rebalancing techniques. The improvement of the convergence rate is investigated in a series of test calculations. The optimal strategy is found to be alternation between one SOR iteration and three to four free iterations while the rebalancing should be limited to two initial iterations in normal LWR cases.