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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.
N. Meynet, A. Bentaib
Nuclear Technology | Volume 178 | Number 1 | April 2012 | Pages 17-28
Technical Paper | Safety and Technology of Nuclear Hydrogen Production, Control, and Management / Hydrogen Safety and Recombiners | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detailed model is proposed for numerical simulation of hydrogen ignition inside box-type passive autocatalytic recombiners (PARs). The model is focused on the reactive channel flow between two catalytic sheets of a recombiner. It includes complex chemistry and multicomponent transport for homogeneous hydrogen combustion and complex surface chemistry for heterogeneous hydrogen recombination. First calculations are dedicated to H2/air mixtures without steam at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. The analysis of the total homogeneous and heterogeneous heat release rates according to the inlet hydrogen molar fraction reveals three possible operation regimes for the recombiners from pure catalytic conversion to pure gaseous combustion. A physical criterion is then proposed for the ignition of H2/air mixtures inside the recombiners. The numerical ignition threshold at 5.4% of hydrogen without steam is in good agreement with experimental data. The criterion is then applied to the ternary diagram including all representative H2/air/H2O mixtures for severe accident conditions in pressurized water reactors. It shows a sharper transition from the catalytic regime to the gaseous one for high hydrogen concentrations. A specific strategy finally allows defining an extended PAR hydrogen ignition limit in the entire ternary diagram, which is well corroborated by the available experimental database.