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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.
Jeffery D. Densmore, Thomas M. Evans, Michael W. Buksas
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 1 | May 2008 | Pages 1-22
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-01
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Discrete Diffusion Monte Carlo (DDMC) is a technique for increasing the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations in diffusive media. If standard Monte Carlo is employed in such a regime, particle histories will consist of many small steps, a situation that results in a computationally inefficient calculation. In DDMC, particles take discrete steps between spatial cells according to a discretized diffusion equation. Each discrete step replaces many smaller Monte Carlo steps, thus increasing the efficiency of the simulation. In addition, because DDMC is based on the diffusion approximation, it should yield accurate solutions if used judiciously. In this paper, we present a new DDMC method for linear, steady-state radiation transport on adaptive-refinement meshes in two-dimensional Cartesian geometry. Adaptive-refinement meshes are characterized by local refinement such that a spatial cell may have multiple neighboring cells across each face. We specifically examine the cases of (a) a regular mesh structure without refinement, (b) a refined mesh structure where neighboring cells differ in refinement, and (c) a boundary mesh structure representing the interface between a diffusive region (where DDMC is used) and a nondiffusive region (where standard Monte Carlo is employed). With numerical examples, we demonstrate that our new DDMC technique is accurate and can provide efficiency gains of two orders of magnitude over standard Monte Carlo.