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Division Spotlight
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.
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.
Ralf Wittmaack
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 2 | August 1997 | Pages 158-180
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35384
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New design features of future reactors are being developed to ensure the integrity of the reactors under severe accident conditions. These features include the spreading of corium with subsequent flooding and cooling. Numerical simulations are performed to reduce the number of necessary large-scale experiments with radioactive material. For this reason, the development, verification, and validation of simulation methods are important foci. A method for predicting three-dimensional free-surface flows of a single-component, incompressible Newtonian fluid is presented. The thermodynamics and discrete phase transitions are simulated also. In addition to the fluid, structural materials are considered as hydrodynamic obstacles and heat structures. The method is applied to several flow, heat transfer, and phase transition problems of water and glycerol and of cerrotru (low-melting Bi-Sn alloy), thermite, and corium melts. The predictions provide a satisfactory representation of the experimental data and analytical solutions. Different physical processes are analyzed, e.g., gravity waves, creeping flows, Bénard convection, and thermodynamic interactions of fluid, structural material, and surroundings. The method is applied to the layout and design of experiments and exvessel corium-retention devices in nuclear reactors.