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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Taking shape: Fusion energy ecosystems built with public-private partnerships
It’s possible to describe fusion in simple terms: heat and squeeze small atoms to get abundant clean energy. But there’s nothing simple about getting fusion ready for the grid.
Private developers, national lab and university researchers, suppliers, and end users working toward that goal are developing a range of complex technologies to reach fusion temperatures and pressures, confounded by science and technology gaps linked to plasma behavior; materials, diagnostics, and electronics for extreme environments; fuel cycle sustainability; and economics.
R. C. Bauer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 2 | November 2017 | Pages 177-188
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1360715
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools are becoming more widely used in thermal-hydraulic (T/H) and plant analyses due to advances in computational capability, data storage, and speed. However, to date, most CFD studies are ad hoc in nature with little emphasis on building links between and among CFD studies and CFD users. Thus, CFD codes have not yet been effectively leveraged as design tools within the T/H and nuclear applications communities due to lack of a comprehensive and rigorous approach to both verification and validation and uncertainty propagation. Consequentially, CFD is generally relegated to limited diagnostic use or as an adjunct to conventional lumped-parameter codes that often are based on limited testing and use conservative bounding factors applied to the needed design calculations.
Because significant technical progress and development of CFD have occurred over the last decade, the potential now exists to move the use of CFD into the mainstream of analysis tools to address design, operational, and regulatory issues for complex hydraulic systems. This potential can serve as a basis upon which to develop CFD for use in an integrated design-by-simulation (IDS) environment. The CFD methodology to provide this rigor is identified as predictive-CFD (P-CFD) in this technical note.
In the P-CFD/IDS methodology, synergy and consensus will be obtained through more rigorous validation of the underlying physics phenomena of each analysis objective through use of an extensive database of validation-level tests (VLTs) by many universities and laboratories. This approach logically suggests the creation of a national P-CFD database to contain these VLT data sets for general practitioner access. Thus, the underlying physics is a building block for multiple system objectives whose phenomena require those physics behaviors for the needed assessments. By using the P-CFD/IDS methodology, CFD methods can be made consistent, credible, and reproducible.
Extensive references have been included to provide the status of the underlying background that supports P-CFD/IDS development. The path outlined is fully practical but difficult. This technical note is written to show a framework by which a validated CFD study for a given hydraulic objective can be prepared and used for the analyses of complex hydraulic systems to support design conclusions.