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Evans, K. J.

Publications and source records attributed to Evans, K. J..

Hydrogen Permeation in FeCrAl APMT Alloy for Accident Tolerant Fuel Cladding

Iron-chromium-aluminum (FeCrAl) alloys such as APMT (advanced powder metallurgy tubing) are candidate materials to replace zirconium alloys for the light water reactor fuel cladding. This alloy meets the requirements to be a material more tolerant of high-temperature accidents than the current zirconium alloys. One concern is that the use of FeCrAl may result in an increase in tritium presence in the coolant compared to the current design. The aim of the current research was to obtain effective diffusion coefficients (D eff ) for hydrogen through APMT using the Devanathan-Stachurski cell. Results showed that at 30°C the D eff value was 2.8 × 10 -8 cm 2 /s. Results also showed a linear relationship between the permeated hydrogen flux and the inverse of the test specimen thickness, which demonstrated the validity of the permeation measurements.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Progress in fast, accurate multi-scale climate simulations

We present a survey of physical and computational techniques that have the potential to contribute to the next generation of high-fidelity, multi-scale climate simulations. Examples of the climate science problems that can be investigated with more depth with these computational improvements include the capture of remote forcings of localized hydrological extreme events, an accurate representation of cloud features over a range of spatial and temporal scales, and parallel, large ensembles of simulations to more effectively explore model sensitivities and uncertainties. Numerical techniques, such as adaptive mesh refinement, implicit time integration, and separate treatment of fast physical time scales are enabling improved accuracy and fidelity in simulation of dynamics and allowing more complete representations of climate features at the global scale. At the same time, partnerships with computer science teams have focused on taking advantage of evolving computer architectures such as many-core processors and GPUs. As a result, approaches which were previously considered prohibitively costly have become both more efficient and scalable. In combination, progress in these three critical areas is poised to transform climate modeling in the coming decades.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Accelerating Time Integration for the Shallow Water Equations on the Sphere Using GPUs

The push towards larger and larger computational platforms has made it possible for climate simulations to resolve climate dynamics across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This direction in climate simulation has created a strong need to develop scalable time-stepping methods capable of accelerating throughput on high performance computing. This work details the recent advances in the implementation of implicit time stepping on a spectral element cube-sphere grid using graphical processing units (GPU) based machines. We demonstrate how solvers in the Trilinos project are interfaced with ACME and GPU kernels can significantly increase computational speed of the residual calculations in the implicit time stepping method for the shallow water equations on the sphere. We show the optimization gains and data structure reorganization that facilitates the performance improvements.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗