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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.
Qingquan Pan, Tengfei Zhang, Xiaojing Liu, Yun Cai, Lianjie Wang, Kan Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 183-192
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1968223
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a high dominance ratio system, the problem of slow fission source convergence is faced during the Monte Carlo criticality calculation. The Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have been proven to reduce the dominance ratio. Still, the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have also proven to be unable to accelerate the convergence of the fission source. With the estimation of errors in the cumulative fission source and the batch size optimization methodology, the optimal batch size growth for the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method is proposed. Compared with the direct simulation with the optimal batch size growth, the Wielandt simulation and the Superhistory simulation better use the optimal batch size growth. A single fuel rod model was tested, and the results show that the new method is helpful for the acceleration of fission source convergence.