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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.
Gregory G. Davidson, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 3 | July 2008 | Pages 242-255
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In 1975, Wachspress developed basis functions that can be constructed upon very general zone shapes, including convex polygons and polyhedra, as well as certain zone shapes with curved sides and faces. Additionally, Adams has recently shown that weight functions with certain properties will produce solutions with full resolution, meaning that they are capable of producing physically meaningful solutions in the diffusive limit. Wachspress rational functions (WRFs) possess these necessary properties. Here, we present methods to construct and integrate WRFs on quadrilaterals. We also present an asymptotic analysis of a discontinuous finite element discretization on quadrilaterals, and we present numerical results.