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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.
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Penfield and Enos: Outage planning in the COVID-19 era
Penfield
Enos
Energy Harbor’s Beaver Valley plant, located about 34 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Pa., was one of many nuclear sites preparing for a scheduled outage as the coronavirus pandemic intensified in March. The baseline objective of any planned outage—to complete refueling on time and get back to producing power—was complicated by the need to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
While over 200 of the plant’s 850 staff members worked from home to support the outage, about 800 contractors were brought in for jobs that could only be done on-site. Nuclear News Staff Writer Susan Gallier talked with Beaver Valley Site Vice President Rod Penfield and General Plant Manager Matt Enos about the planning and communication required.
Beaver Valley can look forward to several more outages in the future, now that plans to shut down the two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, each rated at about 960 MWe, were reversed in March. “The deactivation announcement happened in the middle of all our planning,” Enos said. “It’s a shame we haven’t had a chance to get together as a large group and celebrate that yet.”
While the focus remains on safe pandemic operations, the site now has two causes for celebration: an outage success and a long future ahead.
Khaled Meftah, Arthur E. Ruggles
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 3 | June 2006 | Pages 328-334
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A scaled model boiling water reactor (SMBWR) uses water at 0.095 MPa in a transparent heated channel 0.5 m in length with four electrical heated fuel simulator rods. The axial void profile in the channel is measured using conductivity probes. The boiling channel exhibits bubbly and churn flow regimes. In the present study, the bubbly-churn regime transition is investigated using the variance, kurtosis, and skewness of the probability density function (pdf) derived from the conductivity measurements. The positioning of five conductivity sensors along the boiling water channel allows examination of the gradual changes in the flow regime characteristics. The results indicate it is possible to detect the bubbly-to-churn flow regime transition using the pdf distribution attributes of the conductivity probes.
