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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
A. K. Kuczaj, E. M. J. Komen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 2-15
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9441
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A potential cause of thermal fatigue failures in energy cooling systems is identified with cyclic stresses imposed on a piping system. These are generated from temperature changes in regions where a cold flow is intensively mixed with a hot flow. Typical locations of such thermal mixing are T-junctions in nuclear reactor cooling systems. Turbulent mixing in a T-junction is investigated here using large-eddy simulation (LES). In general, LES can capture very well the mixing phenomena and the accompanying turbulent flow fluctuations that occur in a T-junction. Through a direct comparison with experimental results, an assessment of the accuracy of LES predictions is made for the Smagorinsky and the Vreman models. It is shown that the results obtained with the Vreman model are closest to the experimental results. The Smagorinsky model is found to provide the least accurate results. This is particularly detected in the near-wall regions that are of great importance in thermal fatigue predictions. Detailed numerical validation was performed with simulations using five different spatial mesh resolutions. These simulations show that computational meshes must resolve important turbulence length scales in order to obtain sufficiently accurate results. This accuracy assessment and error quantification are based on the integral and Taylor length scales of turbulence. For the investigated cases, the mesh resolution with average cell sizes of the order of /3 (three times smaller than the Taylor microscale length) is sufficient to give very similar results to those obtained on much finer meshes. An engineering estimation of the minimal mesh resolution gives an initial guideline for construction of computational meshes that allow for accurate predictions of turbulent mixing in a T-junction using LES. Additionally, analysis of the temperature measurement data at specified probe locations is presented along with a quantification of an error introduced by the applied LES method.