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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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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
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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.
Sin Kim, Goon-Cherl Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 117 | Number 3 | March 1997 | Pages 340-352
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35348
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The anisotropic turbulent diffusion and the turbulent mixing phenomena in rod bundle flow fields are studied. The former is a distinguishing feature of the flow through rod bundles, and the latter is essential to the subchannel thermal-hydraulic analysis. On the basis of the flow pulsation, which is suggested as a main process of turbulent mixing, scale relations for principal parameters such as the anisotropic factor and mixing rate are derived. To obtain a scale relation for the anisotropic factor, eddy viscosities are classified into isotropic and flow pulsation parts. Scales of each part are estimated using the scale analysis method. For the purpose of determining the length and velocity scales of the pul sating flow, a hypothetical circulating flow with a period corresponding to the frequency of the pulsation is assumed. The scale relation is compared with the experimental data and shows good agreement both with respect to trend and magnitude for various geometries. Thus, it is concluded that the flow pulsation is a significant contributor to the strong anisotropy in the rod bundle flow field. Also, the mixing rate is predicted by estimating the effective mixing velocity. The estimated mixing rate is transformed into well-known dimensionless numbers, which are compared with the experimental data and with correlations to verify the predictability.