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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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Apr 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
May 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The 2025 ANS election results are in!
Spring marks the passing of the torch for American Nuclear Society leadership. During this election cycle, ANS members voted for the newest vice president/president-elect, treasurer, and six board of director positions (four U.S., one non-U.S., one student). New professional division leadership was also decided on in this election, which opened February 25 and closed April 15. About 21 percent of eligible members of the Society voted—a similar turnout to last year.
Xiaomeng Dong, Juliana P. Duarte, Zhijian Zhang, Michael L. Corradini, Zhaofei Tian, Guangliang Chen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 174-186
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1326781
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Numerical simulation has been widely used in nuclear reactor safety analyses to gain insight into key phenomena. This paper compares simulations of a single-phase steady flow in a 2 × 2 rod bundle with spacer grids among different codes based on the high pressure heat transfer facility at University of Wisconsin. The detailed computational fluid dynamics modeling methodology was developed using FLUENT to help in the facility design and pretest analyses. After comparison between different turbulence models, the Standard k-ω was chosen to simulate the effect of unheated solid walls and grid spacers. It was found that solid walls had a small influence on the flow and heat transfer behavior. We note the effect of rod-to-wall gap needs be taken into account if it is larger than half of the gap between the rods. We compared the simulations of FLUENT, COBRA-TF, and TRACE to determine the position of thermocouples to be used in the planned experiments. An investigation was performed on the effect of bending angles of the grid spacer mixing vanes. Results showed that a larger bending angle results in higher turbulence mixing and locally higher Nusselt numbers downstream of the mixing vanes. Also, a small change of the bending angles results in a notable difference in the temperature distributions of the main flow.