I was recently looking for a paper on the font of all scientific knowledge these days, Google Scholar, and couldn’t find the original paper presenting the concept of manufactured solutions. I found the paper, but also found this image of most of the attendees that I thought should be offered up for the historical record.
The original paper is
Lingus, C. “Analytical test case’s for neutron and radiation transport codes.” Second conference on transport theory. 1971. PDF
The special issue of Nuclear Science and Engineering featuring papers from the 2019 Mathematics and Computation Meeting held in Portland is now available. I was the guest editor for this issue.
You can read my introduction to the issue, and find all of the papers at this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295639.2020.1802915
Thanks to all of the contributors to the issue.
I just posted the presentation I gave to the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory (the radiation chemistry people at ND). The talk was this morning and it went well, despite my rather inchoate understanding of low energy electron physics in liquids.
The talk can be found here.
Here is a crossword puzzle that made today. I woke up and I thought I had some nice clues for a crossword puzzle, so I decided to try my hand at it.
Artistry?
If you want to solve this interactively, click here.
I made this Google map so that any where I travel, I can see if there is a Caravaggio painting close by. Enjoy.
In my special topics course on Big Data analytics, we recently covered the use of Dplyr. As part of that lecture I created the above image. It is based on the thorough description of creating a similar image for a different period/location found at this site.
The data set contains information from the College Station airport weather station and dates back to 1953.
Those nuclear engineering students who are just starting school again, need to start thinking about summer already. The best route to getting a job after graduation is through the connections you make with internships. The experience you get with an internship will help you decide what aspect of nuclear engineering you want to work in after you graduate. They also give employers a chance to see how you work and if you are a good fit for their organization.
That being said, the internship process can be lengthy. I suggest that this month you start to talk to professors in your department about possible internships next summer. Tell them what you are interested in and ask for his/her advice. Then when you’ve identified the companies, and even better if its a manager, make contact this fall so that you are on the radar when hiring decisions are made.
The long lead time is important in nuclear due to security as well. Most facilities have some sort of back ground investigation before you can be admitted to the workplace. That means finding an internship in April is too late for a lot of places.
Good luck!
On Wednesday morning my student Weixiong Zheng successfully defended his Masters thesis entitled “Physics-Based Uncertainty Quantification for ZrHx Thermal Scattering Law”. His thesis work is partially covered in this American Nuclear Society Transactions paper.
His work centered on how low-energy neutrons scatter off zirconium hydrate (ZrHx — the x varies from 1 to 2). For those not nuclear engineers, most nuclear reactors use fission caused by thermal (low energy) neutrons. In some reactors, especially research reactors like we have here at TAMU, there is zirconium hydride in the fuel.
Greetings from Santa Fe. I’m here for the International Conference on Transport Theory. This is a meeting that happens every two years and brings together people from several disciplines: gas kinetics, neutron transport, radiative transfer, and even computer graphics.
I gave a talk today about using filters to improve the accuracy of discrete ordinates calculations for neutral particle transport. It was pretty well received, I think at least in part, to the fact that it is a pretty novel idea. Most approaches to get high fidelity in angle transport simulations just throw more degrees of freedom (unknowns) at the problem. My method actually tries to crack the nut of the problem by making the angles talk to each other.
Another highlight from today was the talk by Richard Sanchez from CEA. His paper talked about boundary and interface conditions for the Pn equations. I had worked on these equations in my PhD thesis, and had used a simple approach to the interface conditions. These conditions are equivalent to the Mark conditions. The basic idea is that the characteristics of the equations (that is linear combinations of the moments) that cross the interface should be continuous across an interface, but the other characteristics can have a jump across the interface.
At the end of Richard’s talk, Jim Morel pointed out that the upwinding procedure I used will give the correct number of boundary/interface conditions. I had not thought of this before, but I’m now interested in comparing my conditions to the “correct” conditions.
One other thing I would like to mention is Max Rosa’s talk regarding a Lattice Boltzmann method to solve the neutron diffusion equation. Based on his derivation, which started with a BGK collision operator, I bet it is possible to derive a Pn or SPn solution using lattice Boltzmann. I’m going to talk to him about it tomorrow.