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Scopatz, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Scopatz, A..

First and second order approximations to stage numbers in multicomponent enrichment cascades

This paper describes closed form, Taylor series approximations to the number product stages in a multicomponent enrichment cascade. Such closed form approximations are required when a symbolic, rather than a numeric, algorithm is used to compute the optimal cascade state. Both first and second order approximations were implemented. The first order solution was found to be grossly incorrect, having the wrong functional form over the entire domain. On the other hand, the second order solution shows excellent agreement with the 'true' solution over the domain of interest. An implementation of the symbolic, second order solver is available in the free and open source PyNE library. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

A dynamic, dependent type system for nuclear fuel cycle code generation

The nuclear fuel cycle may be interpreted as a network or graph, thus allowing methods from formal graph theory to be used. Nodes are often idealized as nuclear fuel cycle facilities (reactors, enrichment cascades, deep geologic repositories). With the advent of modern object-oriented programming languages - and fuel cycle simulators implemented in these languages - it is natural to define a class hierarchy of facility types. Bright is a quasi-static simulator, meaning that the number of material passes through a facility is tracked rather than natural time. Bright is implemented as a C++ library that models many canonical components such as reactors, storage facilities, and more. Cyclus is a discrete time simulator, meaning that natural time is tracked through out the simulation. Therefore a robust, dependent type system was developed to enable inter-operability between Bright and Cyclus. This system is capable of representing any fuel cycle facility. Types declared in this system can then be used to automatically generate code which binds a facility implementation to a simulator front end. Facility model wrappers may be used either internally to a fuel cycle simulator or as a mechanism for inter-operating multiple simulators. While such a tool has many potential use cases it has two main purposes: enabling easy performance of code-to-code comparisons and the verification and the validation of user input.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗