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Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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!
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Latest News
Steam is a sign of cooling system function . . . at ITER
Steam from one of ITER’s ten induced-draft cooling cells offers visual confirmation of a successful cooling system test, the ITER organization announced April 30. ITER’s cooling system features 60 kilometers of piping with pumps, filters, and heat exchangers that can pull water through at up to 14 cubic meters per second. Once fully operational, two cooling loops—one to remove the heat generated by the plasma in the ITER tokamak and one for its supporting infrastructure—will be capable of extracting up to 1,200 MW of heat.
Man Gyun Na, Belle R. Upadhyaya, Xiaojia Xu, In Joon Hwang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 154 | Number 3 | November 2006 | Pages 353-366
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2638
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a space reactor core dynamics is identified online by a recursive least-squares method. Based on this identified reactor model consisting of the control reactivity and the thermal electric generator power, the future thermoelectric (TE) generator power is predicted. A model predictive control method is applied to design an automatic controller for TE generator power control for a space reactor of the SP-100 system. The basic concept of the model predictive control is to solve an optimization problem for a finite future at current time and to implement as the current control input only the first optimal control input among the solutions of the finite time steps. At the next time step, the procedure to solve the optimization problem is then repeated. The objectives of the proposed model predictive controller are to minimize both the difference between the predicted TE generator power and the desired power and the variation of the control reactivity. Also, the control constraints are subjected to maximum and minimum reactivity and to maximum reactivity change. Therefore, the genetic algorithm that is appropriate to accomplish multiple objectives is used to optimize the model predictive controller. A lumped parameter simulation model of the SP-100 nuclear space reactor is used to verify the proposed controller. The results of numerical simulation to check the performance of the proposed controller show that the TE generator power level controlled by the proposed controller could track the target power level effectively, satisfying all control constraints.