ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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
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
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
G. L. Mesina, D. L. Aumiller, F. X. Buschman, M. R. Kyle
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 83-95
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The RELAP5-3D code is typically used to model stationary, land-based, thermal-hydraulic systems and contains specialized physics for the modeling of nuclear power plants. It can also model thermal-hydraulic systems in other inertial and accelerating frames of reference. By changing the magnitude of the gravitational vector through user input, RELAP5-3D can model thermal-hydraulic systems on planets, moons, and space stations. Additionally, the field equations were modified to model thermal-hydraulic systems in a noninertial frame, such as occur onboard moving craft or during earthquakes for land-based systems.
Transient body forces affect fluid flow in thermal-fluid machinery aboard accelerating crafts during rotational and translational accelerations. It is useful to express the equations of fluid motion in the accelerating frame of reference attached to the moving craft. However, careful treatment of the rotational and translational kinematics is required to accurately capture the physics of fluid motion. Correlations for flow at angles between horizontal and vertical are generated via interpolation because limited experimental data exist.
Equations for three-dimensional fluid motion in a noninertial frame of reference are developed. Two different systems for describing rotational motion are presented, user input is discussed, and examples of a modeled simple thermal-hydraulic system undergoing both rotational and translational motion are provided.