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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.
N. Odry, J.-J. Lautard, J.-F. Vidal, G. Rimpault
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 187 | Number 3 | September 2017 | Pages 240-253
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1320891
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An iterative domain decomposition method (DDM) is implemented inside the APOLLO3 Sn transport core solver MINARET. Based on a block-Jacobi algorithm, the method inherently suffers a convergence penalty in terms of both computing time and number of iterations. An acceleration method has to be developed in order to overcome this difficulty. This paper investigates a nonlinear coarse mesh rebalance (CMR) method that favors the way information propagates through the core when domain decomposition is used. The fundamental idea involves updating each subdomain boundary condition thanks to a core-sized low-order calculation on a coarse spatial mesh. The numerical convergence is sped up. Performances are meeting the expectations since the CMR acceleration systematically succeeds in overbalancing the domain decomposition additional cost. The aim of such a DDM + CMR algorithm is eventually to introduce more parallelism when solving the spatial transport equation. Nevertheless, parallel computing is not addressed in this paper.