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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
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
V. Cocilovo, G. Ramogida, E. Visca
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 230-234
Materials Development | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a fusion power reactor the Plasma Facing Components (PFC) will experience a thermal and neutron irradiation induced creep together with tensile properties degradation and swelling due to neutron irradiation. So the investigation of the long term creep effects on the materials used for the PFC's in a fusion power plant are of vital importance for the design and safe operation of the device. On the other hand the creep behavior study for a given material requires long and expensive test campaigns, repeated on specimens at different levels of neutron irradiation, because of the material parameters variation due to the cumulated irradiation.In this work we want to investigate if the numerical mechanical simulations employment, according to a proper methodology, could reduce the number of needed creep tests, because this would be a valuable help in defining suitable materials and valid conceptual designs for PFC's. For this reason a method based on the systematic variation of the parameters of the empirical law, e.g. the Norton-Bailey, is outlined. To exemplify it, the behavior of a simplified model is analyzed under thermal and mechanical cyclic loading in a time transient elasto-plastic simulation, including the creep behavior, varying the parameters in the empirical creep law for the material.