ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Gretar Tryggvason, Ming Ma, Jiacai Lu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 312-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transient motion of bubbly flows in vertical channels is studied, using direct numerical simulation (DNS) in which every continuum length and time scale is resolved. A simulation of a large number of bubbles of different sizes at a friction Reynolds number of 500 shows that small bubbles quickly migrate to the wall, but the bulk flow takes much longer to adjust to the new bubble distribution. Simulations of much smaller laminar systems with several spherical bubbles have been used to examine the full transient motion; those show a nonmonotonic evolution where all the bubbles first move toward the walls, and the liquid then slowly slows down, eventually allowing some bubbles to return to the center of the channel. Unlike the statistically steady state, where the flow structure is relatively simple and in some cases depends only on the sign of the bubble lift coefficient, the transient evolution is more sensitive to the governing parameters. Early efforts to use DNS results to provide values for the unresolved closure terms in a simple average model for the flow found by statistical learning from the data using neural networks are discussed. The prospect for using the results from simulations of large systems with bubbles of different sizes in turbulent flows for large eddy–like simulations are explored, including the simplification of the interface structure by filtering. Finally, preliminary results for flows undergoing topology changes are shown.