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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
There has been growing interest within the U.S. during the past year to rejuvenate the nuclear power option and to expand the role of computer simulations for the design and analysis of new reactor concepts. For the past several years Argonne National Laboratory and Purdue University have been supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to develop a next generation nuclear reactor simulator based on the commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code STAR-CD to solve the temperature/flui field and the integral transport code DeCART to solve the Boltzmann Equation for the neutron flux distribution in the reactor core. Applications of the Numerical Nuclear Reactor (NNR) to practical Light Water Reactor problems has required more than 100 million mesh and tens of hours of computational time on Linux clusters for the solution of a single reactor state point. Professor Downar will describe the physics and target applications of the NNR and will discuss preliminary efforts to reduce the computational burden of the coupled codes using high end computing and advanced computational algorithms.