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3D Printing Possibilities: Additive Manufacturing Impact Limiters for Transportation Casks
With the significant advances in additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing, Orano Federal Services and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte recently re-examined the capabilities to print impact limiters for transportation casks used to ship spent nuclear fuel. Impact limiters protect transportation casks (sometimes also referred to as transportation overpacks) and their contents during an accident. Impact limiter designs must withstand testing based on a certain significance level of hypothetical accidents, including drops, crushing, fires, and immersion in water.
Daniel B. Fromowitz, Gary B. Zeigler
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 2 | February 2016 | Pages 166-180
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-49
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using two different methods, angular quadrature sets are developed with greater than about 1000 angles per octant to reduce ray effects in three-dimensional (3-D), discrete ordinates radiation transport calculations with large air or void regions. Quadrature sets from both methods are evaluated in two distinct 3-D models sensitive to quadrature details and are shown to behave reasonably well. The first method is a previously described method that is examined here in 3-D. The second method produces quadrature sets that have quadrature directions approximately evenly spaced over the entire surface of the unit sphere.