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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
Friday, May 20, 2022|8:00AM–5:30PM EDT
Ellwood
Although mainly distributed as a CFD toolbox, OpenFOAM is structured as a general open-source library for the discretization and parallel solution of partial differential equations on unstructured meshes. This combines with a high-level object-oriented API and with an intuitive finite-volume discretization method to allow for a streamlined development of advanced multi-physics solvers for various applications and by authors with various backgrounds. This is resulting in a rapidly growing community of users and developers, with a number of official and community-driven solvers that can nowadays help complement legacy nuclear codes with a wide geometric flexibility, HPC scalability, quick code tailoring, streamlined coupling possibilities, and a full transparency for improved E&T approaches.
The workshop will first present an overview of the multi-physics capabilities of OpenFOAM; listing its main features as a numerical library; highlighting some important achievements and milestones from various authors; singling out currently available solvers for nuclear applications; and discussing the lessons learned from a decade of development efforts. The objective will be to provide the audience with up-to-date information about the modelling possibilities provided by OpenFOAM and to summarize its strengths and challenges, thus allowing for more informed decisions about the opportunity to employ OpenFOAM, or existing OpenFOAM-based tools, for one's own applications.
The workshop will then provide a practical introduction to two open-source tools based on OpenFOAM, namely: the GeN-Foam code for the multiphysics analysis of nuclear reactors; and the OFFBEAT code for the 1.5-D, 2-D and 3-D simulation of fuel behaviour. Topics covered will include learning best practices, available resources, setting up a model, running, post-processing, basics of code tailoring. The objective will be to provide all necessary information for autonomous learning and use of these tools.
The workshop will be conducted as a mix of presentations, open discussions and practical examples. Participants are encouraged to test the practical examples on their own laptops. To that purpose, participants will need to have OpenFOAM 9 already installed (including paraFoam or paraview). Installation instructions are available at https://openfoam.org/download/
