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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Qingming He, Chao Fang, Liangzhi Cao, Haoyu Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2023 | Pages 472-484
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2106733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This technical note presents a unified framework of stabilized finite element methods for solving the Boltzmann transport equation. The unified framework is derived from the standard Galerkin weak form with a subgrid scale model, which is different from the traditional Petrov-Galerkin finite element framework that modifies the test function to construct the stabilization term. By this method, first, the unknowns are decomposed into their numerical solutions and residuals. The decomposed unknowns are then embedded into the Galerkin weak form with an approximation for the residual, which yields a stabilized variational formula. Different methods of stabilization are derived from different approximations of the residual. Under this framework, all the frequently used stabilized methods can be obtained, including the streamline upwinding Petrov-Galerkin method, the Galerkin least-squares method, and the algebraic subgrid scale method. Thus, a unified framework of such methods is established. The similarities and differences across the different approximations are also compared in this technical note. The numerical results show that the behaviors of different methods are similar with the same stabilization parameters and that all these stabilized techniques can yield satisfactory and stable solutions.