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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
Standards Program
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
M. Jarrett, B. Kochunas, A. Zhu, T. Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 2 | October 2016 | Pages 208-227
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-51
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coarse-mesh finite difference (CMFD) method is one of the most widely used methods for accelerating the convergence of numerical transport solutions. However, in some situations, iterative methods using CMFD can become unstable and fail to converge. We present and evaluate three different modifications of the CMFD scheme that provide enhanced stability: multiple transport sweeps, artificial diffusion, and relaxing the flux update. We present the Fourier analysis on each of these schemes for an idealized problem to characterize the stability and rate of convergence for both fixed-source and fission-source problems. Comparisons of the effectiveness of these methods are also performed numerically for a variety of benchmark boiling water reactor and pressurized water reactor problems using the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors neutronics code MPACT. We demonstrate a means of stabilizing CMFD by modifying the diffusion coefficient to make the iteration behave more like the partial-current CMFD (pCMFD) method, which is unconditionally stable, and show through a sequence of numerical experiments that the CMFD method performs similarly to the pCMFD method for the selected benchmark problems. We also show, both theoretically and experimentally, that modifying the diffusion coefficient in the CMFD equations is similar to underrelaxing the scalar flux update. The theoretical and experimental results show that many of the known techniques for stabilizing CMFD are fundamentally very closely related.