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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Current potential patches

A novel form of the current potential, a mathematical tool for the design of stellarators and stellarator coils, is developed. Specifically, these are current potentials with a finite-element basis, called current potential patches. Current potential patches leverage the relationship between distributions of magnetic dipoles and current potentials to explore limits of the access properties of stellarator coil sets. An example calculation is shown using the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX) equilibrium, demonstrating the method's use in coil design and understanding the limits of the access properties of coil sets. Current potential patches have additional desirable properties such as of promoting sparse current sheet solutions and identifying crucial locations of shaping current placement. A result is found for the HSX equilibrium that shaping currents covering only 22% of the winding surface are sufficient to produce the equilibrium to a good accuracy, provided a toroidal field is generated by an exterior coil set.

Elder, Todd↗
DOE OSTI2026

C‐Cracking of Brittle‐Material Spheres From Eccentric Hertzian Contact

Contact of brittle-material spheres can occur while they are manufactured, handled, or used in operation as roller elements or in deformably processed composite material. Statistically, the directional contact between two spheres will nearly always be oblique or eccentric in an unconfined and mobile sphere population. Although analyses of oblique contact exist, the portrayal of its maximum (tensile) first principal stress ( S 1 ) field is lacking. This information is needed for improved judgment of the prospect of crack initiation. Given these, the S 1 due to eccentric contact and subsequent crack initiation was analyzed using finite element analysis (FEA) and corroborative demonstration of c-crack creation. The FEA shows that an asymmetric S 1 field is created about the contact patch and is caused by superimposed shear intrinsic to eccentric contact. A crack will initiate if the maximum S 1 exceeds the material's tensile strength, and its field will cause the crack to propagate and arrest to form a C-shaped crack, or c-crack. C-crack initiation trends with lower applied forces, with greater amount of contact eccentricity, higher coefficient of friction, and smaller spherical radius. Finally, these metrics deserve recognition, especially when c-cracked brittle-material spheres are used in a system whose functionality or reliability is potentially compromised by the c-cracks.

Hertzian contact↗
DOE OSTI2025

Radiation hot spot formation on UF 6 30B cylinders

The accurate material accountancy of a country's enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF 6 ) stockpiles is imperative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for determining appropriate material safeguards. Uranium hexafluoride is typically stored in large cylinders with enrichment verification typically performed with a NaI gamma detector using the enrichment meter method. This approach for calculating enrichment assumes that the UF 6 is homogeneous inside the cylinder. Here, the measurements and tests presented in this manuscript show that the UF 6 in cylinders left outside in the elements can experience fractionation, leading to inhomogeneity, and subsequent development of radiation hot spots. These hot spot locations can produce errant enrichment measurements. In dark-colored cylinders that experience significant surface heating from the sun, UF 6 sublimates off the cylinder walls, leaving only the uranium daughter products in a horizontal patch (stripe) along the cylinder's midline. This daughter patch is hypothesized to be the source of the radiation hot spots. The patch forms during the summer and tends to decay away during the winter, when solar intensity and temperatures are reduced.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2024

R-Adaptivity to Enable Compression of Elementary Computations in Extreme-Scale Finite Element Simulators

Modern computing systems are capable of exascale calculations, which are revolutionizing the development and application of high-fidelity numerical models in computational science and engineering. While these systems continue to grow in processing power, the available system memory has not increased commensurately, and electrical power consumption continues to grow. A predominant approach to limit the memory usage in large-scale applications is to exploit the abundant processing power and continually recompute many low-level simulation quantities, rather than storing them. However, this approach can adversely impact the throughput of the simulation and diminish the benefits of modern computing architectures. We present three novel contributions to reduce the memory burden while maintaining, and sometimes improving, performance in simulations based on finite element discretizations. The first contribution develops dictionary-based data compression schemes that detect and exploit the structure of the discretization, due to redundancies across the finite element mesh. While these schemes are shown to reduce memory requirements by more than 99% on meshes with large numbers of identical mesh cells, there are applications where this structure does not exist. The second contribution leverages a recently developed augmented Lagrangian optimization algorithm to enable r-adaptivity for meshes with the goal of enhancing the redundancies in the mesh. The third contribution extends these methods to patch-based linear solvers and preconditioners by compressing local matrices. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods to detect, enhance and exploit mesh structure on a suite of examples inspired by large-scale applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗