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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Sebastian Schunert, Yousry Azmy
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 1 | May 2015 | Pages 1-29
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comparison of the accuracy and computational efficiency of spatial discretization methods of the three-dimensional SN equations is conducted, including discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods, the arbitrarily high-order transport method of nodal type (AHOTN), the linear-linear method, the linear-nodal (LN) method, and the higher-order diamond difference method. For this purpose, we have developed a suite of method of manufactured solutions benchmarks that provides an exact solution of the SN equations even in the presence of scattering. Most importantly, our benchmark suite permits the user to set an arbitrary level of smoothness of the exact solution across the singular characteristics. Our study focuses on the computational efficiency of the considered spatial discretization methods.
Numerical results indicate that the best-performing method depends on the norm used to measure the discretization error. We employ discrete Lp norms and integral error norms in this work. For configurations with continuous exact angular flux, high-order AHOTNs perform best under Lp error norms, while the LN method performs best when measured by integral error norms. When the angular flux is discontinuous, a new singular-characteristic tracking method for three-dimensional geometries performs best among the considered methods.