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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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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Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Anthony L. Alberti, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 837-858
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1758482
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we attempt to overcome the “curse of dimensionality” inherent to neutron diffusion kinetics problems by employing a novel reduced-order modeling technique known as proper generalized decomposition (PGD). The novelty of this work is that it represents the first attempt at applying PGD reduced-order modeling to time-dependent multigroup neutron diffusion kinetics. The performance of PGD reduced-order models (ROMs) will be quantified by comparing PGD ROMs to reference high-fidelity solutions using Rattlesnake for the TWIGL problem, a standard reactor kinetics benchmark.
We show that for problems that exhibit sufficient spatial regularity, our proposed PGD algorithm computes accurate ROMs in less time than the reference high-fidelity calculation. By considering a variation of the TWIGL benchmark that maintains an analogous delayed supercritical behavior but has a smooth spatial solution, we compute PGD ROMs with a maximum relative difference in total power of less than 2.2% using 103 fewer degrees of freedom and a speedup of nearly 13× when compared to reference solutions. However, when introducing the stronger spatial irregularities of the reference benchmark, the accuracy and timing of the proposed PGD algorithm diminishes. We show that by using continuous finite elements, PGD ROMs are subject to undesirable numerical oscillations. In this paper, we motivate the use of PGD in neutron diffusion kinetics, discuss the adopted mathematical framework, and using our results, discuss the challenges and unique aspects of our implementation.