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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Akio Yamamoto
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 145 | Number 3 | November 2003 | Pages 291-298
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE03-A2384
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the response matrix method, a numerical divergence problem has been reported when extremely small or large discontinuity factors are utilized in the calculations. In this paper, an alternative response matrix formulation to solve the divergence problem is discussed, and properties of iteration matrixes are investigated through eigenvalue analyses. In the conventional response matrix formulation, partial currents between adjacent nodes are assumed to be discontinuous, and outgoing partial currents are converted into incoming partial currents by the discontinuity factor matrix. Namely, the partial currents of the homogeneous system (i.e., homogeneous partial currents) are treated in the conventional response matrix formulation. In this approach, the spectral radius of an iteration matrix for the partial currents may exceed unity when an extremely small or large discontinuity factor is used. Contrary to this, an alternative response matrix formulation using heterogeneous partial currents is discussed in this paper. In the latter approach, partial currents are assumed to be continuous between adjacent nodes, and discontinuity factors are directly considered in the coefficients of a response matrix. From the eigenvalue analysis of the iteration matrix for the one-group, one-dimensional problem, the spectral radius for the heterogeneous partial current formulation does not exceed unity even if an extremely small or large discontinuity factor is used in the calculation; numerical stability of the alternative formulation is superior to the conventional one. The numerical stability of the heterogeneous partial current formulation is also confirmed by the two-dimensional light water reactor core analysis. Since the heterogeneous partial current formulation does not require any approximation, the converged solution exactly reproduces the reference solution when the discontinuity factors are directly derived from the reference calculation.