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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.
Longfei Xu, Huayun Shen, Junxia Wei, Liujun Pan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 161-182
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1941565
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron transport equation is usually solved against a stationary background medium. When the background material is moving, the transport equation will need to be modified. Solving the transport equation with moving material is quite complicated, especially for the curved coordinate system because of the double angular redistributions. In this study, the discretization method of the simplified transport equation considering the moving-material effect is implemented in three-dimensional cylindrical geometry. Directly solving this modified transport equation with the standard solution technique is problematic since the advection term introduced by moving material may render the transport solver numerically unstable. The speed ratio λ is defined for stability analysis. A forced-stable method is proposed in this study to achieve good numerical stability for any material speeds and time-step sizes. The accuracy of this new method is verified using manufactured solutions. Steady numerical results demonstrate that the effects introduced by background motion cannot be neglected as the material speed starts to approach one-tenth of the neutron speed. Moreover, transient analysis indicates that the moving background has a considerable impact on the criticality of a system.