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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
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!
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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.
Ang Zhu, Yunlin Xu, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 1 | April 2017 | Pages 23-37
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1272387
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fourier analysis of the continuous infinite homogenous multigroup (MG) formulation is investigated in this paper for the time-dependent Boltzmann transport equation using discrete ordinates formulation. In addition, a continuous two-group (2G) and one-group (1G) Fourier analysis is performed to generate an analytical spectral radius and provide the basis for a theoretical analysis of the convergence. The discrete 1G formulation is then presented, and the theoretical analysis is found to predict the same spectral radius as the continuous 1G formulation. A typical pressurized water reactor pin cell problem with 47-group library is then homogenized with reflective boundary conditions, and the numerical spectral radius is calculated using the MPACT code. The theoretical predictions and the numerical results from the pin cell case agree very well and are found to have the following behavior: (1) The spectral radius is usually very close to unity for standard parameters for realistic transient application, (2) the spectral radius generally decreases as a function of inners per outer M, (3) the spectral radius generally decreases as a function of time-step size and then increases beyond unity for extremely small time steps, and (4) the spectral radius is almost constant as a function of the inserted reactivity. Good agreement is observed with the MG Fourier analysis. Finally, it is shown that the group sweeping coarse mesh finite difference method is theoretically and numerically very slow to converge the time-dependent neutron transport equation and that it is necessary to move the right-hand-side fission and transient source to the left-hand side and to solve the entire matrix form of the system.