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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
B. R. Christensen, A. R. Raffray, M. S. Tillack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1175-1179
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A846
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In an inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant, each fusion micro-explosion (~10 Hz) causes thermal and structural loads on the IFE reactor wall and driver optics. The loading on the wall must remain sufficiently low to ensure that economic and safety constraints are met.One proposed method for decreasing the intensity of the wall loading is to fill the reaction chamber with a gas, such as Xe, at low density. The gas will absorb much of the radiation and ion energy from the fusion event, and then slowly release it to the chamber wall. Unfortunately the protective gas introduces major heat loads on the direct drive target. The thermal loading of a target, during injection, largely determines the viability of that target upon reaching chamber center. Thus, the density of the gas must be carefully selected to ensure that a target will survive injection.The objective of this work is to quantify and characterize the heat flux resulting from the interaction of the target and the protective gas. The loading of the target is modeled using DS2V, a commercial DSMC (Direct Simulation Monte Carlo) program. Using DS2V, this work explores the effect of the protective gas density, temperature, sticking (condensation) and accommodation coefficients on the heat flux to the target.