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My Story: John L. Swanson—ANS member since 1978
. . . and in 2019, on his 90th birthday.
Swanson in 1951, the year of his college graduation . . .
My pre-college years were spent in a rural suburb of Tacoma, Wash. In 1947, I enrolled in Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Ore.; I majored in chemistry and graduated in 1951. While at Reed, I met and married a young lady with whom I would raise 3 children and spend the next 68 years of my life—almost all of them in Richland, Wash., where I still live.
I was fortunate to have a job each of my “college summers” that provided enough money to cover my college costs for the next year; I don’t think that is possible these days. My job was in the kitchen/dining hall of a salmon cannery in Alaska. Room and board were provided and the cannery was in an isolated location, so I could save almost every dollar of my salary.
Hans R. Hammer, Jim E. Morel, Yaqi Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 453-480
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1542865
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we show the extension of nonlinear diffusion acceleration (NDA) to geometries containing small voids using a weighted-least-squares (WLS) high-order equation. Even though the WLS equation is well defined in voids, the low-order drift-diffusion equation was not defined in materials with a zero cross section. This paper derives the necessary modifications to the NDA algorithm. We show that a small change to the NDA closure term and a nonlocal definition of the diffusion coefficient solve the problems for void regions. These changes do not affect the algorithm for optically thick material regions while making the algorithm well defined in optically thin ones. We use a Fourier analysis to perform an iterative analysis to confirm that the modifications result in a stable and efficient algorithm. Later in the paper, numerical results of our method are presented. We test this formulation with a small, one-dimensional test problem. Additionally, we present results for a modified version of the C5G7 benchmark containing voids as a more complex, reactor-like problem. We compared our results to Texas A&M’s transport code PDT, utilizing a first-order discontinuous formulation as reference and the self-adjoint angular flux equation with void treatment (SAAF), a different second-order form. The results indicate that the NDA WLS performed comparably or slightly worse then the asymmetric SAAF while maintaining a symmetric discretization matrix.