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At least 595 records · Page 33
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Dispersive transport and symmetry of the dispersion tensor in porous media

The macroscopic laws controlling the advection and diffusion of solute at the scale of the porous continuum are derived in a general manner that does not place limitations on the geometry and time evolution of the pore space. Special focus is given to the definition and symmetry of the dispersion tensor that is controlling how a solute plume spreads out. Here, we show that the dispersion tensor is not symmetric and that the asymmetry derives from the advective derivative in the pore-scale advection-diffusion equation. When flow is spatially variable across a voxel, such as in the presence of a permeability gradient, the amount of asymmetry can be large. As first shown by Auriault [J.-L. Auriault Transp. Porous Med. 85, 771 (2010)TPMEEI0169-391310.1007/s11242-010-9591-y] in the limit of low Péclet number, we show that at any Péclet number, the dispersion tensor D ij satisfies the flow-reversal symmetry D ij (+q)=D ji (-q) where q is the mean flow in the voxel under analysis; however, Reynold's number must be sufficiently small that the flow is reversible when the force driving the flow changes sign. We also demonstrate these symmetries using lattice-Boltzmann simulations and discuss some subtle aspects of how to measure the dispersion tensor numerically. Particularly, the numerical experiments demonstrate that the off-diagonal components of the dispersion tensor are antisymmetric which is consistent with the analytical dependence on the average flow gradients that we propose for these off-diagonal components.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2018

Suppression of Tearing Modes by Radio Frequency Current Condensation [Suppression of Tearing Modes by RF Current Condensation]

Currents driven by radio frequency (rf) waves in the interior of magnetic islands can stabilize deleterious tearing modes in tokamaks. Present analyses of stabilization assume that the local electron acceleration is unaffected by the presence of the island. However, the power deposition and electron acceleration are sensitive to the perturbation of the temperature. The nonlinear feedback on the power deposition in the island increases the temperature perturbation, and can lead to a bifurcation of the solution to the steady-state heat diffusion equation. The combination of the nonlinearly enhanced temperature perturbation with the rf current drive sensitivity to the temperature leads to an rf current condensation effect, which can increase the efficiency of rf current drive stabilization and reduce its sensitivity to radial misalignment of the ray trajectories. As a result, the threshold for the effect is in a regime that has been encountered in experiments, and will likely be encountered in ITER.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Nucleation and growth kinetics for intercalated islands during deposition on layered materials with isolated pointlike surface defects

Theory and stochastic lattice-gas modeling is developed for the formation of intercalated metal islands in the gallery between the top layer and the underlying layer at the surface of layered materials. Our model for this process involves deposition of atoms, some fraction of which then enter the gallery through well-separated pointlike defects in the top layer. Subsequently, these atoms diffuse within the subsurface gallery leading to nucleation and growth of intercalated islands nearby the defect point source. For the case of a single point defect, continuum diffusion equation analysis provides insight into the nucleation kinetics. However, complementary tailored lattice-gas modeling produces a more comprehensive and quantitative characterization. We analyze the large spread in nucleation times and positions relative to the defect for the first nucleated island. We also consider the formation of subsequent islands and the evolution of island growth shapes. The shapes reflect in part our natural adoption of a hexagonal close-packed island structure. As a result, motivation and support for the model is provided by scanning tunneling microscopy observations of the formation of intercalated metal islands in highly-ordered pyrolytic graphite at higher temperatures.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2018

Does sink efficiency unequivocally characterize how grain boundaries impact radiation damage?

The role of grain boundaries in limiting irradiation damage in nanocrystalline materials is often correlated with the grain boundary sink efficiency. Here, we demonstrate on a tungsten material system (which has very distinct vacancy and interstitial mobilities) that sink efficiency does not unequivocally describe how grain boundaries impact irradiation damage. Rather, it reflects a particular defect diffusion equation that can change if any of the bulk conditions change. Even when denuded zone formation does not occur and grain boundaries have zero sink efficiencies, grain boundaries still impact the performance of nanocrystalline materials under irradiation by acting as a saturable defect storage site. However, denuded zone formation can occur under a necessary requirement of extra defect recombination at the grain boundaries (which, for example, is not possible when vacancy migration does not occur). These insights provide answers to several outstanding questions regarding the sink efficiency of a grain boundary and assist in parametrizing the role of grain boundaries in limiting irradiation damage in nanocrystalline materials.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2016

Filamentation effect in a gas attenuator for high-repetition-rate X-ray FELs

A sustained filamentation or density depression phenomenon in an argon gas attenuator servicing a high-repetition femtosecond X-ray free-electron laser has been studied using a finite-difference method applied to the thermal diffusion equation for an ideal gas. A steady-state solution was obtained by assuming continuous-wave input of an equivalent time-averaged beam power and that the pressure of the entire gas volume has reached equilibrium. Both radial and axial temperature/density gradients were found and describable as filamentation or density depression previously reported for a femtosecond optical laser of similar attributes. The effect exhibits complex dependence on the input power, the desired attenuation, and the geometries of the beam and the attenuator. Time-dependent simulations were carried out to further elucidate the evolution of the temperature/density gradients in between pulses, from which the actual attenuation received by any given pulse can be properly calculated.

Feng, Yiping↗
DOE OSTI2018

Viscous Shear Banding in Cutting of Metals

Shear banding is a type of plastic flow instability with often adverse implications for cutting and deformation processing of metals. Here, we study the mechanics of plastic flow evolution within single shear bands in Ti- and Ni-based alloy systems. The local shear band displacement profiles are quantitatively mapped at high resolution using a special micromarker technique. The results show that shear bands, once nucleated, evolve by a universal viscous sliding mechanism that is independent of microstructural details. The evolution of local deformation around the band is accurately captured by a momentum diffusion equation based on a Bingham-type flow rule. The predicted band viscosity is very small, compared to those of liquid metals. A plausible explanation for this small viscosity and fluid-like behavior at the band, based on phonon drag, is presented.

Engineering↗
DOE OSTI2022

Analytical Sensitivity Analysis of a Spent Nuclear Fuel Cask

Here, we report nuclear science and engineering is a field increasingly dominated by computational studies resulting from increasingly powerful computational tools. As a result, analytical studies, which previously pioneered nuclear engineering, are increasingly viewed as secondary or unnecessary. However, analytical solutions to reduced-fidelity models can provide important information concerning the underlying physics of a problem and aid in guiding computational studies. Similarly, there is increased interest in sensitivity analysis studies. These studies commonly use computational tools. However, providing a complementary sensitivity study of relevant analytical models can lead to a deeper analysis of a problem. This work provides the analytical sensitivity analysis of the one-dimensional (1D) cylindrical mono-energetic neutron diffusion equation using the forward sensitivity analysis procedure (FSAP) developed by Cacuci. Further, these results are applied to a reduced-fidelity model of a spent nuclear fuel cask, demonstrating how computational analysis might be improved with a complementary analytic sensitivity analysis.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2015

COUPLING OF RELAP5-SCDAP MOD4.0 AND NEUTRONIC CODES

High-fidelity and accurate nuclear system codes play a key role in the design and analysis of complex nuclear power plants, which consist of multiple subsystems, such as the reactor core (and its fuel, burnable poisons, control elements, etc.), the reactor internal structures, the vessel, and the energy conversion subsystem and beyond to grid demand. Most commonly the interplay between these various subsystems is modeled using coupled codes, each of which represents one of the subsystems. And the most common direct coupling is that of thermal-hydraulics and neutronics codes. The subject of this paper is the coupling of codes that model not only thermal-hydraulics and neutronics, but also structural components damage. Furthermore, the neutronic component is not limited to the sole core solver. The coupled code system encompasses thermal-hydraulics, material performance of the fuel, neutronic solver, and neutronic data preparation. Thus, this paper presents a framework for coupling RELAP5/SCDAPSIM/MOD4.0 with a suite of neutron kinetics codes that includes NESTLE, DRAGON and a version of the ENDF library. The version of the RELAP5/SCDAPSIM/MOD4.0 code used in this work is one developed by Innovate System Software (ISS) as part of the international SCDAP Development and Training Program (SDTP) for best-estimate analysis to model reactor transients including severe accident phenomena. This RELAP5/SCDAPSIM/MOD4.0 code version is also capable of predicting nuclear fuel performance. It uses nodal power distributions to calculate mechanical and thermal parameters such as heat-up, oxidation and meltdown of fuel rods and control rods, the ballooning and rupture of fuel rod cladding, the release of fission products from fuel rods, and the disintegration of fuel rods into porous debris and molten material. On the neutronics side, this work uses the NESTLE and DRAGON codes. NESTLE is a multi-dimensional static and kinetic neutronic code developed at North Carolina State University. It solves up to four energy groups neutron diffusion equations utilizing the Nodal Expansion Method (NEM) in Cartesian or hexagonal geometry. The DRAGON code, developed at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, performs lattice physics calculations based on the neutron transport equation and is capable of using very fine energy group structures. In this work, we have developed a coupling approach to exchange data among the various modules. In the coupling process, the generated nuclear data (in fine multigroup energy structure) are collapsed down into two- or four-group energy structures for use in NESTLE. The neutron kinetics and thermal-hydraulics modules are coupled at each time step by using the cross-section data. The power distribution results of the neutronic calculations are transmitted to the thermal-hydraulics code. The spatial distribution of coolant density and the fuel-moderator temperature, which result from the thermal-hydraulic calculations, are transmitted back to the neutron kinetics codes and then the loop is closed using new neutronics results. Details of the actual data transfers will be described in the full length paper.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2017

A high-order staggered meshless method for elliptic problems

Here, we present a new meshless method for scalar diffusion equations, which is motivated by their compatible discretizations on primal-dual grids. Unlike the latter though, our approach is truly meshless because it only requires the graph of nearby neighbor connectivity of the discretization points. This graph defines a local primal-dual grid complex with a virtual dual grid, in the sense that specification of the dual metric attributes is implicit in the method's construction. Our method combines a topological gradient operator on the local primal grid with a generalized moving least squares approximation of the divergence on the local dual grid. We show that the resulting approximation of the div-grad operator maintains polynomial reproduction to arbitrary orders and yields a meshless method, which attains $O(h^{m})$ convergence in both $L^2$- and $H^1$-norms, similar to mixed finite element methods. We demonstrate this convergence on curvilinear domains using manufactured solutions in two and three dimensions. Application of the new method to problems with discontinuous coefficients reveals solutions that are qualitatively similar to those of compatible mesh-based discretizations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Randomized Sketching Algorithms for Low-Memory Dynamic Optimization

This paper develops a novel limited-memory method to solve dynamic optimization problems. The memory requirements for such problems often present a major obstacle, particularly for problems with PDE constraints such as optimal flow control, full waveform inversion, and optical tomography. In these problems, PDE constraints uniquely determine the state of a physical system for a given control; the goal is to find the value of the control that minimizes an objective. While the control is often low dimensional, the state is typically more expensive to store. This paper suggests using randomized matrix approximation to compress the state as it is generated and shows how to use the compressed state to reliably solve the original dynamic optimization problem. Concretely, the compressed state is used to compute approximate gradients and to apply the Hessian to vectors. The approximation error in these quantities is controlled by the target rank of the sketch. This approximate first- and second-order information can readily be used in any optimization algorithm. As an example, we develop a sketched trust-region method that adaptively chooses the target rank using a posteriori error information and provably converges to a stationary point of the original problem. Numerical experiments with the sketched trust-region method show promising performance on challenging problems such as the optimal control of an advection-reaction-diffusion equation and the optimal control of fluid flow past a cylinder.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Space-Time Block Preconditioning for Incompressible Flow

Parallel-in-time methods have become increasingly popular in the simulation of time-dependent numerical PDEs, allowing for the efficient use of additional message passing interface processes when spatial parallelism saturates. Most methods treat the solution and parallelism in space and time separately. In contrast, all-at-once methods solve the full space-time system directly, largely treating time as simply another spatial dimension. All-at-once methods offer a number of benefits over separate treatment of space and time, most notably significantly increased parallelism and faster time to solution (when applicable). However, the development of fast, scalable all-at-once methods has largely been limited to time-dependent (advection-)diffusion problems. This paper introduces the concept of space-time block preconditioning for the all-at-once solution of incompressible flow. By extending well-known concepts of spatial block preconditioning to the space-time setting, we develop a block preconditioner whose application requires the solution of a space-time (advection-)diffusion equation in the velocity block, coupled with a pressure Schur complement approximation consisting of independent spatial solves at each time-step, and a space-time matrix-vector multiplication. The new method is tested on four classical models in incompressible flow. Finally, the results indicate perfect scalability in refinement of spatial and temporal mesh spacing, perfect scalability in nonlinear Picard iteration count when applied to a nonlinear Navier--Stokes problem, and minimal overhead in terms of number of preconditioner applications compared with sequential time-stepping.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

TRANSP-based closed-loop simulations of current profile optimal regulation in NSTX-Upgrade

Active control of the toroidal current density profile is critical for the upgraded National Spherical Torus eXperiment device (NSTX-U) to maintain operation at the desired high-performance, MHD-stable, plasma regime. Initial efforts towards current density profile control have led to the development of a control-oriented, physics-based, plasma-response model, which combines the magnetic diffusion equation with empirical correlations for the kinetic profiles and the non-inductive current sources. The developed control-oriented model has been successfully tailored to the NSTX-U geometry and actuators. Moreover, a series of efforts have been made towards the design of model-based controllers, including a linear-quadratic-integral optimal control strategy that can regulate the current density profile around a prescribed target profile while rejecting disturbances. In this work, the tracking performance of the proposed current-profile optimal controller is tested in numerical simulations based on the physics-oriented code TRANSP. These high-fidelity closed-loop simulations, which are a critical step before experimental implementation and testing, are enabled by a flexible framework recentlydeveloped to perform feedback control design and simulation in TRANSP.

current profile control↗
DOE OSTI2017

Modular Aquatic Simulation System 1D

MASS1 simulates open channel hydrodynamics and transport in branched channel networks, using cross-section averaged forms of the continuity, momentum, and convection diffusion equations. Thermal energy transport (temperature), including meteorological influences is supported. The thermodynamics of total dissolved gas (TDG) can be directly simulated. MASS1 has been developed over the last 20 years. It is currently being used on DOE projects that require MASS1 to beopen source. Hence, the authors would like to distribute MASS1 in source form.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2015

Reactor Application for Coaching Newbies

RACCOON is a Moose based reactor physics application designed to engage undergraduate and first-year graduate students. The code contains capabilities to solve the multi group Neutron Diffusion equation in eigenvalue and fixed source form and will soon have a provision to provide simple thermal feedback. These capabilities are sufficient to solve example problems found in Duderstadt & Hamilton (the typical textbook of senior level reactor physics classes). RACCOON does not contain any advanced capabilities as found in YAK.

Schunert, Sebastian↗
DOE OSTI2024

DiscoFluxM version 1.x

DiscoFluxM is software for modeling the deformation behavior of crystalline materials within the third-party finite-element based software, MOOSE. The software enables full-field crystal plasticity finite element simulations of deformation processes of metals and other crystalline materials. DiscoFluxM is an implementation of the DiscoFlux theoretical and algorithmic framework for coupling single-crystal plasticity with dislocation transport. The continuum mesoscale modeling framework is founded upon a nonlocal dislocation-density based crystal plasticity theory. The nonlocal theory couples continuum dislocation transport with an otherwise spatially-local single-crystal model employing nonlinear thermoelasticity and crystallographic plasticity. Dislocation transport is modeled by enforcing dislocation conservation at a slip-system level through the solution of advection-diffusion equations. The configuration of geometrically necessary dislocation density gives rise to a back-stress that inhibits or accentuates the flow of dislocations.

Luscher, Darby↗
DOE OSTI2022

Simulation of CEFR neutronic start-up tests with FENNECS

This paper presents simulation results of selected Neutronic Start-up Tests of the China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) obtained by the neutronics code FENNECS that have been performed within the frame of the IAEA Coordinated Research Program I31032. The Finite Element Neutronics code FENNECS is developed at GRS and solves the few-group steady-state and transient diffusion equation using a Galerkin-based finite element approach. Its main purpose is the safety assessment of Small Modular Reactors and Micro Reactors with complex geometry (e.g., rotating control drums) which gain increased interest internationally. Serpent has been applied to create reference models of the CEFR and cross-section libraries in 10 energy groups for FENNECS. Using these libraries, the following experiments have been simulated with FENNECS: net criticality, control rod integral and differential worth, void reactivity effect, subassembly exchange reactivity effects and reaction rate distribution. The obtained satisfactory agreements with the measurements represent a valuable contribution to the validation of FENNECS. (author)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dynamical model for social distancing in the U.S. during the COVID-19 epidemic

Social distancing has led to a “flattening of the curve” in many states across the U.S. This is part of a novel, massive, global social experiment which has served to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of a vaccine or effective anti-viral drugs. Hence it is important to be able to forecast hospitalizations reasonably accurately. We propose on phenomenological grounds a random walk/generalized diffusion equation which incorporates the effect of social distancing to describe the temporal evolution of the probability of having a given number of hospitalizations. The probability density function is log-normal in the number of hospitalizations, which is useful in describing pandemics where the number of hospitalizations is very high. We used this insight and data to make forecasts for states using Monte Carlo methods. Back testing validates our approach, which yields good results about a week into the future. States are beginning to reopen at the time of submission of this paper and our forecasts indicate possible precursors of increased hospitalizations. However, the trends we forecast for hospitalizations as well as infections thus far show moderate growth. Additionally we studied the reproducibility in New York (Italian strain) and California (Wuhan strain). We find that even if there is a difference in the transmission of the two strains, social distancing has been able to control the progression of COVID 19.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

An Adaptive Reduced Basis Collocation Method Based on PCM ANOVA Decomposition for Anisotropic Stochastic PDEs

The combination of reduced basis and collocation methods enables efficient and accurate evaluation of the solutions to parameterized PDEs. Here, we study the stochastic collocation methods that can be combined with reduced basis methods to solve high-dimensional parameterized stochastic PDEs. We also propose an adaptive algorithm using a probabilistic collocation method (PCM) and ANOVA decomposition. This procedure involves two stages. First, the method employs an ANOVA decomposition to identify the effective dimensions, i.e., subspaces of the parameter space in which the contributions to the solution are larger, and sort the reduced basis solution in a descending order of error.Then, the adaptive search refines the parametric space by increasing the order of polynomials until the algorithm is terminated by a saturation constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for solving a stationary stochastic convection-diffusion equation, a benchmark problem chosen because solutions contain steep boundary layers and anisotropic features. Lastly, we show that two stages of adaptivity are critical in a benchmark problem with anisotropic stochasticity.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗