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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.
Charlotte Sandrin, Richard Sanchez, Florence Dolci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 1 | May 2011 | Pages 59-72
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-44
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Today's reactor core calculations are done in diffusion with a few coarse groups and require the homogenization of the core assemblies as well as a correct representation of the reflector. In industrial applications a homogeneous reflector is often used with cross sections obtained from transport calculations and adjusted to fit in-core measurements. However, the need for better precision in the core diffusion calculations and the emergence of new reflector concepts, such as for the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), require an increase in the number of coarse groups for novel loading patterns and a rethinking of how to define the equivalent reflector. In this work we analyze and extend current techniques for the reflector homogenization for core calculations. Following the adopted industrial methodology, we have perfected a technique for the determination of an equivalent homogenous reflector by implementing a Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and showed its limitations through the analysis of an academic slab reactor model and of a realistic two-dimensional representation of the EPR. We have compared the precision of the resulting core calculations to transport reference calculations as well as to diffusion calculations using a multigroup albedo boundary condition. We have also explored the use of current-preserving flux discontinuity coefficients at the core-reflector interface in conjunction with an equivalent reflector.