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Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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The current status of heat pipe R&D
Idaho National Laboratory under the Department of Energy–sponsored Microreactor Program recently conducted a comprehensive phenomena identification and ranking table (PIRT) exercise aimed at advancing heat pipe technology for microreactor applications.
Robert D. Woolley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 191-207
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-133
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The mathematical underpinnings of cost optimal radiation shielding designs based on an extension of optimal control theory are presented, a heuristic algorithm to iteratively solve the resulting optimal design equations is suggested, and computational results for a simple test case are discussed.
A typical radiation shielding design problem can have infinitely many solutions, all satisfying the problem's specified set of radiation attenuation requirements. Each such design has its own total materials cost. For a design to be optimal, no admissible change in its deployment of shielding materials can result in a lower cost. This applies in particular to very small changes, which can be restated using the calculus of variations as the Euler-Lagrange equations. The associated Hamiltonian function and application of Pontryagin's theorem lead to conditions for a shield to be optimal.