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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Jim E. Morel, James S. Warsa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 156 | Number 3 | July 2007 | Pages 325-342
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We consider two general finite-element lumping techniques for the Sn equations with discontinuous finite-element spatial discretization and apply them to quadrilateral meshes in x-y geometry. One technique is designed to ensure a conservative approximation and is referred to as conservation preserving (CP). The other technique is designed to preserve the exact solution whenever it is contained within the trial space and is referred to as solution preserving (SP). These techniques are applied in x-y geometry on structured nonorthogonal grids using the bilinear-discontinuous finite-element approximation. The schemes are both theoretically analyzed and computationally tested. Analysis shows that the two lumping schemes are equivalent on parallelogram meshes. Computational results indicate that both techniques perform extremely well on smooth quadrilateral meshes. On nonsmooth meshes, the preserving technique retains its excellent performance while the CP technique degrades. The reasons for this degradation are discussed. Although the SP scheme has proven to be generally effective on quadrilateral meshes in x-y geometry, it is not expected to be effective for quadrilaterals in r-z geometry or for hexahedra in three-dimensional Cartesian geometry. Thus, a full lumping procedure for general nonorthogonal meshes that possesses all of the desired properties has yet to be found. For reasons that are discussed, it appears unlikely that such a procedure exists.