Sharif Digital Repository

To quantify the core barrel motion (CBM) in a pressurized water reactor, a scaling factor can be calculated to convert the Root Mean Square (RMS) value of the ex-core signals (%) to the core barrel motion amplitude (mil) (Thompson et al., 1980). In the current paper, a scaling factor is calculated using the direct and adjoint methods for a typical VVER-1000 reactor. The scaling factor is calculated using the perturbed parameters that result from CBM. The results show that the calculated scaling factors are not the same in one and two-dimensional modeling, and strongly depend on the ex-core detector location. The linearity assumption of relative detector response versus the small displacement... 

In this paper, the development of a neutron noise simulator for hexagonal-structured reactor cores using both the forward and the adjoint methods is reported. The spatial discretisation of both 2-D 2-group static and dynamic equations is based on a developed box-scheme finite difference method for hexagonal mesh boxes. Using the power iteration method for the static calculations, the 2-group neutron flux and its adjoint with the corresponding eigenvalues are obtained by the developed static simulator. The results are then benchmarked against the well-known CITATION computer code. The dynamic calculations are performed in the frequency domain which leads to discarding of the time... 

In the present study, the neutron noise, i.e. the stationary fluctuation of the neutron flux around its mean value is calculated based on the 2G, 3D neutron diffusion theory. To this end, the static neutron calculation is performed at the first stage. The spatial discretization of the neutron diffusion equation is performed based on linear approximation of Galerkin Finite Element Method (GFEM) using unstructured tetrahedron elements. Using power iteration method, neutron flux and corresponding eigen-value are obtained. The results are then benchmarked against the valid results for VVER-1000 (3D) benchmark problem. In the second stage, the neutron noise equation is solved using GFEM and... 

A shock control bump (SCB) is a flow control method which uses a local small deformation in a flexible wing surface to considerably reduce the strength of shock waves and the resulting wave drag in transonic flows. Most of the reported research is devoted to optimization in a single flow condition. Here, both equally and variably weighted multi-point optimization and a robust adjoint optimization scheme are used to optimize the SCB. The numerical simulation of the turbulent viscous flow and a gradient-based adjoint algorithm are used to find the optimum location and shape of the SCB for two benchmark aerofoils. A multi-point optimization method under a constant-lift-coefficient constraint is... 

In the present paper, development of the three-dimensional (3D) computational code based on Galerkin finite element method (GFEM) for solving the multigroup forward/adjoint diffusion equation in both rectangular and hexagonal geometries is reported. Linear approximation of shape functions in the GFEM with unstructured tetrahedron elements is used in the calculation. Both criticality and fixed source calculations may be performed using the developed GFEM-3D computational code. An acceptable level of accuracy at a low computational cost is the main advantage of applying the unstructured tetrahedron elements. The unstructured tetrahedron elements generated with Gambit software are used in the... 

A complete continuous adjoint formulation is presented here for the optimization of the turbulent flow entropy generation rate through a turbine cascade. The adjoint method allows one to have many design variables, but still afford to compute the objective function gradient. The new adjoint system can be applied to different structured and unstructured grids as well as mixed subsonic and supersonic flows. For turbulent flow simulation, the k-ω shear-stress transport turbulence model and Roe's flux function are used. To ensure all possible shape models, a mesh-point method is used for design parameters, and an implicit smoothing function is implemented to avoid the generation of non-smoothed... 

Shock control bump (SCB), suction and blowing are three flow control methods used to control the shock wave/boundary layer interaction to reduce the resulting wave drag in transonic flows. An SCB uses a small local surface deformation to reduce the shock wave strength, while the suction decreases the boundary layer thickness and the blowing delays the flow separation. Here, we will use a multi-point continuous adjoint optimisation scheme to find the optimum design of suction and blowing separately or together, or with the SCB, on two supercritical airfoils, i.e. RAE-5225 and RAE-2822, for a wide range of off-design transonic Mach numbers. The RANS flow equations are solved using the Roe’s... 

A shock control bump (SCB) is a flow control method that uses local small deformations in a flexible wing surface to considerably reduce the strength of shock waves and the resulting wave drag in transonic flows. Most of the reported research is devoted to optimization in a single flow condition. Here, we have used a multi-point adjoint optimization scheme to optimize shape and location of the SCB. Practically, this introduces transonic airfoils equipped with the SCB that are simultaneously optimized for different off-design transonic flight conditions. Here, we use this optimization algorithm to enhance and optimize the performance of SCBs in two benchmark airfoils, i.e., RAE-2822 and... 

Classic identifiability analysis of flow barriers in incompressible single-phase flow reveals that it is not possible to identify the location and permeability of low-permeability barriers from production data (wellbore pressures and rates), and that only averaged reservoir properties in between wells can be identified. We extend the classic analysis by including compressibility effects. We use two approaches: a twin experiment with synthetic production data for use with a time-domain parameter-estimation technique, and a transfer-function formalism in the form of bilaterally coupled four-ports allowing for an analysis in the frequency domain. We investigate the identifiability, from noisy... 

Accurate calculation of kinetic parameters is of utmost importance in the safety analysis of a nuclear reactor. In the current paper, two approaches are investigated to evaluate these parameters in energy phase space. In the first approach, these parameters are derived from an energy-continuous form of the forward and adjoint transport equations and then integrals with respect to the energy variable are replaced by weighted summations over the energy groups, while in the second approach these parameters are extracted from the multi-group forward equation and its associate adjoint equation in which their multigroup constants are weighted by forward spectrum. The difference of weighting...