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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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Tong Kyu Park, Han Gyu Joo, Chang Hyo Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 2 | February 2014 | Pages 226-239
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-41
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The multiobjective simulated annealing (MOSA)–based fuel assembly loading pattern (LP) optimization method, employing the discontinuous penalty function (DPF), is extended for multicycle applications by introducing an adaptively constrained discontinuous penalty function (ACDPF). A discontinuous point in the penalty function is adaptively shifted to a better direction during the course of MOSA such that the search can be more efficient. The advantages of the ACDPF-based MOSA algorithm over the original DPF-based algorithm are first examined with a real single-cycle LP optimization problem of an operating reactor, as well as with a simple LP optimization problem that has known solutions. A direct multicycle LP optimization method is then formulated with an application to the first four cycles of the Younggwang Nuclear Unit 4 (YGN4) core. The rearrangement method is devised as a fuel shuffling method that can avoid drastic changes in the LPs of the subsequent cycles of a seed cycle. It is demonstrated that the ACDPF-based MOSA combined with the rearrangement method produces quite effectively the optimum LP sets for the four cycles, which outperform the LPs generated by a series of cyclewise optimizations as well as the actual LPs of YGN4 that were already used in the plant.