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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Andrew T. Till, Marvin L. Adams, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 53-74
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1932224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy discretization of the transport equation is difficult due to numerous strong, narrow cross-section (XS) resonances. The standard traditional multigroup (MG) method can be sensitive to approximations in the weighting spectrum chosen for XS averaging, which can lead to inaccurate treatment of important phenomena such as self-shielding. We generalize the concept of a group to a discontiguous range of energies to create the Finite-Element with Discontiguous-Support (FEDS) method. FEDS uses clustering algorithms from machine learning to determine optimal definitions of discontiguous groups. By combining parts of multiple resonances into the same group, FEDS can accurately treat resonance behavior even when the number of groups is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of resonances. In this paper, we introduce the theory of the FEDS method and describe the workflow needed to use FEDS, noting that ordinary MG codes can use FEDS XSs without modification, provided these codes can handle upscattering. This allows existing MG codes to produce FEDS solutions. In the context of light water reactors, we investigate properties of FEDS XSs compared to MG XSs and compare -eigenvalue and reaction rate quantities of interest to continuous-energy Monte Carlo, showing that FEDS provides higher accuracy and less cancellation of error than MG with expert-chosen group structures.