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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.
Pierre Guérin, Anne-Marie Baudron, Jean-Jacques Lautard, Serge Van Criekingen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 264-275
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2661
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a new technique for determining the pin power in heterogeneous three-dimensional calculations. It is based on a domain decomposition with overlapping subdomains and a component mode synthesis (CMS) technique for the global flux determination. Local basis functions are used to span a discrete space that allows fundamental global mode approximation through a Galerkin technique. Two approaches are given to obtain these local basis functions. In the first one (the CMS method), the first few spatial eigenfunctions are computed on each subdomain, using periodic boundary conditions. In the second one (factorized CMS method), only the fundamental mode is computed, and we use a factorization principle for the flux in order to replace the higher-order eigenmodes. These different local spatial functions are extended to the global domain by defining them as zero outside the subdomain. These methods are well fitted for heterogeneous core calculations because the spatial interface modes are taken into account in the domain decomposition. Although these methods could be applied to higher-order angular approximations - particularly easily to an SPN approximation - the numerical results we provide are obtained using a diffusion model. We show the methods' accuracy for reactor cores loaded with uranium dioxide and mixed oxide assemblies, for which standard reconstruction techniques are known to perform poorly. Furthermore, we show that our methods are highly and easily parallelizable.