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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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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Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
R. E. Nygren, J. D. Miller
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 529-544
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30696
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Phase-III Outboard Pump Limiter is a heat sink made of pyrolytic graphite armor brazed to water-cooled copper tubes. Around the inner wall of the tube wall, some of the water can be in the subcooled boiling regime. The central issue analyzed here is how the heat flow in the tube changes when the thermal resistance along the heated portion of the tube is redistributed. Cracks or braze flaws in the joint between the tile and tube cause this redistribution. Severe cracks or flaws reduce the power-handling capability of this assembly because the local peak heat fluxes increase and, for a given critical heat flux (CHF), the safety margin decreases. There were some surprises. The increase in local peak heat flux for the most common type of flaw encountered in the fabrication of this limiter was negligible up to a flaw size of ∼50%. The examples presented are intended as a case study that illuminates the more general problem of how correlations for heat transfer and for CHF developed for uniform circumferential heating are applied to a case of one-sided heating.
