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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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!
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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Anthony Michael Scopatz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 195 | Number 3 | September 2016 | Pages 273-287
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-153
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a new fuel cycle benchmarking analysis methodology by coupling Gaussian process (GP) regression, a popular technique in machine learning, to dynamic time warping, a mechanism widely used in speech recognition. Together, they generate figures of merit (FOMs) for a suite of fuel cycle realizations. The FOMs may be computed for any time series metric that is of interest to a benchmark. For a given metric, these FOMs have the advantage that they reduce the dimensionality to a scalar and are thus directly comparable. The FOMs account for uncertainty in the metric itself, utilize information across the whole time domain, and do not require that the simulators use a common time grid. Here, a distance measure is defined that can be used to compare the performance of each simulator for a given metric. Additionally, a contribution measure is derived from the distance measure that can be used to rank order the impact of different partitions of a fuel cycle metric. Lastly, this paper warns against using standard signal-processing techniques for error reduction, as error reduction is better handled by the GP regression itself.