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Helion outsources research by funding external partners
Helion has launched a program formalizing its process of funding projects with external research partners. On Tuesday, the fusion company announced it would fund 25 proposals ranging from $50,000 to $500,000, totaling $4 million. The recipients include private companies, universities, and national laboratories.
Jianan Lu, Jiong Guo, Tomasz Kozlowski, Fu Li
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 131-146
Technical Paper – Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1504545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor–Pebble Bed Module (HTR-PM) is a large-scale complex system that includes reactor core, steam generator, helium circulator, and other important components. When integrating these components, coupling problems such as multiphysics problem, multicircuit problem, multiscale problem, and multimodule problem arise in the numerical simulation. The HTR-PM multicircuit system comprises the primary circuit and secondary circuit, which are simulated by two independent codes and coupled by the interface in the once-through steam generator. Although time-consuming, Picard iteration is a feasible and convenient coupling method to integrate two components because oversolving in the early stages of the iteration causes strong fluctuation between circuits. To address this problem, optimization of the maximum subiteration number and convergence precision have been implemented to improve the efficiency and numerical stability of the Picard iteration. The Dynamic Residual Balance method, an improved version of the Residual Balance method, is proposed to prevent oversolving inside the subiterations. It takes into consideration fluctuation between circuits, and this method is robust in a wide range of cases. Moreover, the nonlinear preconditioned Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov method, which has less fluctuation between circuits than Picard iteration, is a coupling scheme that updates all the solution variables from the primary circuit and the secondary circuit simultaneously. Outstanding convergence and efficiency can be obtained by implementing the proper preconditioner in this HTR-PM multicircuit problem. The downside is that it requires significant modification to the legacy codes.