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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 217 records · Page 12
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2013

Improvements, enhancements, and optimizations of COBRA-TF

The Reactor Dynamics and Fuel Management Group (RDFMG) at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has become active in the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) program by delivering, supporting, and further developing CTF, the PSU version of the Coolant Boiling in Rod Arrays - Two Fluids (COBRA-TF) Thermal/Hydraulic (T/H), sub-channel program. New development work on CTF was primarily geared towards decreasing the execution time of the code so that it may eventually be used for performing pin-by-pin, full-core simulations. Great gains have been made through targeting sections of source code for optimization. For example, wall clock time has been reduced for a one-assembly, three-dimensional model, containing {approx}9,400 mesh cells, from 9.2 min to 1 min. A further improvement has been reduction in code memory usage, which was previously prohibitive for large models. In conjunction with the run time speedups, this has enabled the simulation of a refined quarter-core model ({approx}460,000 mesh cells), which saw a reduction in memory usage from over 130 GB to less than 3 GB. In addition to the optimization work, RDFMG has also created a preprocessor utility for the fast and less error-prone generation of CTF input decks. Furthermore, basic post-processing capabilities have been implemented by creating a CTF subroutine for producing Visualization Tool-Kit (VTK) files that output mesh data and associated simulation results. These VTK files can be opened with visualization software. (authors)

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2016

SU-F-J-211: Scatter Correction for Clinical Cone-Beam CT System Using An Optimized Stationary Beam Blocker with a Single Scan

Purpose: X-ray scatter photons result in significant image quality degradation of cone-beam CT (CBCT). Measurement based algorithms using beam blocker directly acquire the scatter samples and achieve significant improvement on the quality of CBCT image. Within existing algorithms, single-scan and stationary beam blocker proposed previously is promising due to its simplicity and practicability. Although demonstrated effectively on tabletop system, the blocker fails to estimate the scatter distribution on clinical CBCT system mainly due to the gantry wobble. In addition, the uniform distributed blocker strips in our previous design results in primary data loss in the CBCT system and leads to the image artifacts due to data insufficiency. Methods: We investigate the motion behavior of the beam blocker in each projection and design an optimized non-uniform blocker strip distribution which accounts for the data insufficiency issue. An accurate scatter estimation is then achieved from the wobble modeling. Blocker wobble curve is estimated using threshold-based segmentation algorithms in each projection. In the blocker design optimization, the quality of final image is quantified using the number of the primary data loss voxels and the mesh adaptive direct search algorithm is applied to minimize the objective function. Scatter-corrected CT images are obtained using the optimized blocker. Results: The proposed method is evaluated using Catphan@504 phantom and a head patient. On the Catphan©504, our approach reduces the average CT number error from 115 Hounsfield unit (HU) to 11 HU in the selected regions of interest, and improves the image contrast by a factor of 1.45 in the high-contrast regions. On the head patient, the CT number error is reduced from 97 HU to 6 HU in the soft tissue region and image spatial non-uniformity is decreased from 27% to 5% after correction. Conclusion: The proposed optimized blocker design is practical and attractive for CBCT guided radiation therapy. This work is supported by grants from Guangdong Innovative Research Team Program of China (Grant No. 2011S013), National 863 Programs of China (Grant Nos. 2012AA02A604 and 2015AA043203), the National High-tech R&D Program for Young Scientists by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2015AA020917)

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2016

Using a derivative-free optimization method for multiple solutions of inverse transport problems

Identifying unknown components of an object that emits radiation is an important problem for national and global security. Radiation signatures measured from an object of interest can be used to infer object parameter values that are not known. This problem is called an inverse transport problem. An inverse transport problem may have multiple solutions and the most widely used approach for its solution is an iterative optimization method. This paper proposes a stochastic derivative-free global optimization algorithm to find multiple solutions of inverse transport problems. The algorithm is an extension of a multilevel single linkage (MLSL) method where a mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithm is incorporated into the local phase. Furthermore, numerical test cases using uncollided fluxes of discrete gamma-ray lines are presented to show the performance of this new algorithm.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Development of fast-running eighth core nodal solution

A fast-running, eighth-core solution technique has been developed for the quick core calculations in ANC, the Westinghouse core analysis code based on the nodal expansion method, and the BEACON{sup TM} Core Monitoring System (BEACON). This technique, referred to as 'Fast Eighth' (Fast8), enables users to obtain satisfactory macroscopic core calculation results such as reactivity, axial offset and assembly power much more quickly than calculations performed in the standard full-core or quarter-core geometry. Fast8 uses three techniques: folding the radial geometry into eighth-core geometry, reducing the axial geometry into a coarse axial mesh geometry, and smearing the spacer grids into nodes on-the-fly after the first calculation in the standard geometry. These geometry adjustments in Fast8 contribute to the reduction of the number of neutronic and material nodes while maintaining the reaction rates in each node. The axial mesh condition dependency in Fast8 is investigated in a xenon transient calculation in single assembly geometry, and the Fast8 maximum axial mesh size is determined based on these results. Fast8 is then applied to the load swing calculation, and the results are compared with the reference, full-core geometry, solution. The critical boron concentration and axial offset of Fast8 show good agreement with the reference solutions, and that Fast8 is a good technique for obtaining macroscopic core calculation results in significantly shorter time. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Historical review and proof-of-concept future method demonstration of adaptive mesh refinement in nuclear engineering for increased fidelity and computational efficiency

As the nuclear industry's use of computational tool increases, the need for increased fidelity and computational efficiency is well known. While most approaches to increased fidelity rely on applying a fine mesh over the problem domain, a more efficient method is to apply an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithm to the mesh definition. In the field of nuclear engineering, AMR has previously been used in conjunction with deterministic methods, including: S{sub N} transport methods, Lattice Boltzmann Methods, and COMSOL. The future of AMR in nuclear engineering is to couple it to a Monte Carlo code with the goal of reducing calculation time. A proof-of-concept example yielded positive results for using the gradient of the flux as a refinement criteria. The refinement criteria was varied from 0.01 to 0.10, which yielded a recommended range of 0.01 to 0.04, and the number of refinement iterations was varied from 0 to 7, with diminishing returns seen after 5 iterations. After the success of the proof-of-concept exercise, work began on creating a full program coupling MCNP6.2 and the AMR algorithm in the deal.II library. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2014

LDRD HPC4Energy Wrapup Report - LDRD 12-ERD-074

High-performance computing and simulation has the potential to optimize production, distribution, and conversion of energy. Although a number of concepts have been discussed, a comprehensive research project to establish and quantify the effectiveness of computing and simulation at scale to core energy problems has not been conducted. We propose to perform the basic research to adapt existing high-performance computing tools and simulation approaches to two selected classes of problems common across the energy sector. The first, applying uncertainty quantification and contingency analysis techniques to energy optimization, allows us to assess the effectiveness of LLNL core competencies to problems such as grid optimization and building-system efficiency. The second, applying adaptive meshing and numerical analysis techniques to physical problems at fine scale, could allow immediate impacts in key areas such as efficient combustion and fracture and spallation. By creating an integrated project team with the necessary expertise, we can efficiently address these issues, delivering both near-term results as well as quantifying developments needed to address future energy challenges.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2012

Review of multi-dimensional large-scale kinetic simulation and physics validation of ion acceleration in relativistic laser-matter interaction

Two new experimental technologies enabled realization of Break-out afterburner (BOA) - High quality Trident laser and free-standing C nm-targets. VPIC is an powerful tool for fundamental research of relativistic laser-matter interaction. Predictions from VPIC are validated - Novel BOA and Solitary ion acceleration mechanisms. VPIC is a fully explicit Particle In Cell (PIC) code: models plasma as billions of macro-particles moving on a computational mesh. VPIC particle advance (which typically dominates computation) has been optimized extensively for many different supercomputers. Laser-driven ions lead to realization promising applications - Ion-based fast ignition; active interrogation, hadron therapy.

ACCELERATION↗
DOE OSTI2013

Optical tomography reconstruction algorithm with the finite element method: An optimal approach with regularization tools

Highlights: •New strategies to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction through mesh and finite element parameterization. •Use of gradient filtering through an alternative inner product within the adjoint method. •An integral form of the cost function is used to make the reconstruction compatible with all finite element formulations, continuous and discontinuous. •Gradient-based algorithm with the adjoint method is used for the reconstruction. -- Abstract: Optical tomography is mathematically treated as a non-linear inverse problem where the optical properties of the probed medium are recovered through the minimization of the errors between the experimental measurements and their predictions with a numerical model at the locations of the detectors. According to the ill-posed behavior of the inverse problem, some regularization tools must be performed and the Tikhonov penalization type is the most commonly used in optical tomography applications. This paper introduces an optimized approach for optical tomography reconstruction with the finite element method. An integral form of the cost function is used to take into account the surfaces of the detectors and make the reconstruction compatible with all finite element formulations, continuous and discontinuous. Through a gradient-based algorithm where the adjoint method is used to compute the gradient of the cost function, an alternative inner product is employed for preconditioning the reconstruction algorithm. Moreover, appropriate re-parameterization of the optical properties is performed. These regularization strategies are compared with the classical Tikhonov penalization one. It is shown that both the re-parameterization and the use of the Sobolev cost function gradient are efficient for solving such an ill-posed inverse problem.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2026

3D TRISO particle-explicit compact meshing

The TRI-structural ISOtropic (TRISO) layered fuel particle is a robust nuclear fuel form offering enhanced safety and performance for advanced reactor concepts, including high-temperature gas-cooled reactors and other Generation IV designs. These poppy-seed-sized particles are embedded in a graphite matrix to form fuel elements that must withstand elevated temperatures and high burn-up levels. The heterogeneous nature of these fuel elements — comprising thousands of randomly distributed TRISO particles — produces complex stress fields and thermal gradients that one- and two-dimensional models cannot accurately capture. While three-dimensional modeling has improved predictions of dimensional changes, internal pressure buildup, and fission product transport under irradiation, current approaches rely on homogenized material properties that are known to have considerable divergence from experimental observations. This work presents a methodology for optimized random packing of TRISO fuel compacts and full three-dimensional mesh generation within the BISON fuel performance code, with each particle coating layer individually discretized. The resulting mesh was demonstrated through heat conduction simulations under representative in-reactor operating conditions, showing strong agreement with expected behavior. This capability enables detailed analysis of particle-to-particle interactions, matrix cracking mechanisms, and the statistical distribution of coating layer failures — all of which directly govern fuel performance and safety margins.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Magnetic mesh generation and field line reconstruction for scrape-off layer and divertor modeling in stellarators

The design of divertor targets and baffles for optimal heat and particle exhaust from magnetically confined fusion plasmas requires a combination of fast, low-fidelity models (such as EMC3-Lite (Feng 2022 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 64 125012)) for scoping studies and high-fidelity ones (such as EMC3-EIRENE (Feng et al 2014 Contrib. Plasma Phys. 54 426–31)) for verification. Both of those approaches benefit from a magnetic flux tube mesh for fast interpolation and mapping of field line segments (Feng et al 2005 Phys. Plasmas 12 052505). A new automated mesh generator for unstructured quadrilateral flux tubes with adaptive refinement is presented and integrated into FLARE (Frerichs 2024 Nucl. Fusion 64 106034). For HSX with an extended first wall, it is found that several layers of flux tubes can span the entire half field period before splitting is required. This is an advantage over the traditional setup of the EMC3-EIRENE mesh where careful construction of several sub- domains is required already for the much tighter present first wall. In particular, there is no longer the need to manually construct a suitable outer boundary for the mesh. The divide and conquer paradigm with unstructured mesh layout offers a powerful alternative for fast head load approximation that is suitable for integration into optimization workflows. Further examples for W7-X and CTH demonstrate the versatile application range.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Accurate Compression of Tabulated Chemistry Models with Partition of Unity Networks

Tabulated chemistry models are widely used to simulate large-scale turbulent fires in applications including energy generation and fire safety. Tabulation via piecewise Cartesian interpolation suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality, leading to a prohibitive exponential growth in parameters and memory usage as more dimensions are considered. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have attracted attention for constructing surrogates for chemistry models due to their ability to perform high-dimensional approximation. However, due to well-known pathologies regarding the realization of suboptimal local minima during training, in practice they do not converge and provide unreliable accuracy. Partition of unity networks (POUnets) are a recently introduced family of ANNs which preserve notions of convergence while performing high-dimensional approximation, discovering a mesh-free partition of space which may be used to perform optimal polynomial approximation. In this work, we assess their performance with respect to accuracy and model complexity in reconstructing unstructured flamelet data representative of nonadiabatic pool fire models. Our results show that POUnets can provide the desirable accuracy of classical spline-based interpolants with the low memory footprint of traditional ANNs while converging faster to significantly lower errors than ANNs. For example, we observe POUnets obtaining target accuracies in two dimensions with 40 to 50 times less memory and roughly double the compression in three dimensions. We also address the practical matter of efficiently training accurate POUnets by studying convergence over key hyperparameters, the impact of partition/basis formulation, and the sensitivity to initialization.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2019

Generating an implicit voronoi mesh to decompose a domain of arbitrarily many dimensions

Described herein are technologies pertaining to generating a Voronoi mesh for an enclosed domain of arbitrarily many dimensions. An implicit Voronoi mesh is received that comprises locations of seeds in the domain. Neighbors of a seed are identified by extending a segment from the seed to the boundary of the domain and performing successive hyperplane trimming of the segment to identify a point on the facet of the Voronoi cell of the seed. A vertex of the cell can be identified by successively extending and trimming one or more additional spokes to identify points on a facet of the cell that are constrained to lie in a (d−n) space, where d is a number of dimensions of the domain and n is a number of iterations. A numerical simulation is performed based on the Voronoi mesh to generate simulation results in applications including surrogate modeling, global optimization, calibration, dimension reduction.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2012

Optimization of multigrid based elliptic solver for large scale simulations in the FLASH code: OPTIMIZATION OF MULTIGRID BASED ELLIPTIC SOLVER IN THE FLASH CODE

FLASH is a multiphysics multiscale adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code originally designed for simulation of reactive flows often found in Astrophysics. With its wide user base and flexible applications configuration capability, FLASH has a dual task of maintaining scalability and portability in all its solvers. The scalability of fully explicit solvers in the code is tied very closely to that of the underlying mesh. Others such as the Poisson solver based on a multigrid method have more complex scaling behavior. Multigrid methods suffer from processor starvation and dominating communication costs at coarser grids with increase in the number of processors. In this paper, we propose a combination of uniform grid mesh with AMR mesh, and the merger of two different sets of solvers to overcome the scalability limitation of the Poisson solver in FLASH. The principal challenge in the proposed merger is the efficiency of the communication algorithm to map the mesh back and forth between uniform grid and AMR. We present two different parallel mapping algorithms and also discuss results from performance studies of the two implementations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Computer Science↗
DOE OSTI2023

Computational design of metamaterials with self contact

Inverse homogenization in combination with contact modeling, topology optimization and shape optimization is used to design metamaterials with optimized macroscopic response. The homogenization assumes length scale separation which allows the non-linear macroscopic behavior to be obtained by analyzing a single unit cell in a lattice structure. Self contact in the unit cell, which is modeled using a third medium contact method, is leveraged to obtain a complex homogenized response. The inverse homogenization problem is initially formulated as a topology optimization problem, where the macroscopic stress–strain behavior is tuned to our liking. However, it is well known that boundary phenomena are difficult to model in topology optimization and that interface modeling is crucial to accurately analyze contact. For that reason, the boundary representation of the topology optimized design is extracted and used as initial design in a subsequent shape optimization. The behaviors of our designs are verified by performing rigorous post-processing analyzes using conforming meshes and conventional contact formulations.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2014

Optimization of closed ion source for a high-sensitivity residual gas analyzer

A closed ion source (CIS) has been optimized by investigating the effect of electron entrance slit size and the effect of mesh in the slit. A stainless steel mesh was placed on the electron entrance slits for a uniform potential distribution inside the CIS anode. Sensitivity of the closed ion sources having four different slit sizes with and without the mesh was compared using mass spectra of SF{sub 6} gas (97% He gas base) introduced into the CIS anode through a needle valve. For each CIS, isolation of anode potential with a mesh in the slit exhibited a significant sensitivity enhancement, but ion current measured directly behind each CIS showed negligible mesh effect. In order to elucidate the mesh effect, electron trajectories were simulated inside the anode. The computer simulation shows that, with mesh in the slit, more electrons are focused to a central region of the anode. This suggests ions generated in the CIS with mesh should have higher probability of passing through the quadrupole mass filter.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2021

Preparing an Incompressible-Flow Fluid Dynamics Code for Exascale-Class Wind Energy Simulations

The U.S. Department of Energy has identified exascale-class wind farm simulation as critical to wind energy scientific discovery. A primary objective of the ExaWind project is to build high-performance, predictive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools that satisfy these modeling needs. GPU accelerators will serve as the computational thoroughbreds of next-generation, exascale-class supercomputers. Here, we report on our efforts in preparing the ExaWind unstructured mesh solver, Nalu-Wind, for exascale-class machines. For computing at this scale, a simple port of the incompressible-flow algorithms to GPUs is insufficient. To achieve high performance, one needs novel algorithms that are application aware, memory efficient, and optimized for the latest-generation GPU devices. The result of our efforts are unstructured-mesh simulations of wind turbines that can effectively leverage thousands of GPUs. In particular, we demonstrate a first-of-its-kind, incompressible-flow simulation using Algebraic Multigrid solvers that strong scales to more than 4000 GPUs on the Summit supercomputer.

algebraic multigrid↗
DOE OSTI2021

Conservative numerical schemes with optimal dispersive wave relations: Part I. Derivation and analysis

An energy-conserving and an energy-and-enstrophy conserving numerical schemes are derived by approximating the Hamiltonian formulation of the inviscid shallow water flows based on the vorticity-divergence variables. These schemes also conserve the first-order moments such as mass and vorticity, as usual. The conservative properties of the schemes stem from the skew-symmetry and singularities of the Poisson brackets, which are carefully retained in the discrete approximations. Here, the schemes operate on unstructured orthogonal dual meshes, over bounded or unbounded domains, and they are also shown to possess the same optimal dispersive wave relations as those of the Z-grid scheme, which is a consequence of the use of the vorticity and divergence variables.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗