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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Toshiharu Muramatsu, Hisashi Ninokata
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 54-72
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35199
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two thermohydraulics computer programs AQUA and DINUS-3, which are represented by both time- and volume-averaged transport analysis and direct numerical simulation of turbulence, respectively, were developed and validated for the evaluation of thermal striping phenomena. These codes were incorporated with higher order difference schemes to approximate the convection terms in conservation equations and adaptive time-step size control systems based on the fuzzy theory to eliminate numerical instabilities. From validation analyses with fundamental experiments in water and sodium, it was concluded that (a) thermal striping conditions such as spatial distributions of the intensity and the frequency of the fluid temperature fluctuations can be estimated efficiently by a combined approach incorporating the AQUA code and the DINUS-3 code, and (b) the thermal striping phenomena for the in-vessel components of actual liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors can be evaluated by the numerical method without conventional approaches such as large scale model experiments using sodium.