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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
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.
Mohamed S. El-Genk, Cheng Gao
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 3 | June 1996 | Pages 351-364
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35239
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quenching experiments were performed to investigate the effects of radius of curvature and edge angle on pool boiling from downward-facing surfaces in saturated water. The experiments employed two, 20-mm-thick copper test sections that had the same diameter (75 mm) but different surface radii (148 and 218.5 mm) and vapor release (or edge) angles (14.68 and 9.88 deg). The effect of surface area on pool boiling was determined by comparing the present results with the results for a copper section that was of the same thickness but had a surface radius of 148 mm and was less than one-half the surface area. The maximum heat flux (qMHF) was highest at the lowermost position and decreased with increased local inclination on the surface. Both local and surface average qMHF were representative of quasi-steady-state critical heat flux. The high edge angle reduced vapor accumulation, which enhanced surface coolability and shortened its quenching time. For an edge angle of 9.88 deg, increasing the surface area (or surface radius) insignificantly affected the local qMHF near the edge of the copper section but lowered it everywhere else by ∼10%. For the same surface area, the larger edge angle (or smaller surface radius) increased qMHF by as much as 40%.