ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
January 2026
Latest News
Quality is key: Investing in advanced nuclear research for tomorrow’s grid
As the energy sector faces mounting pressure to grow at an unprecedented pace while maintaining reliability and affordability, nuclear technology remains an essential component of the long-term solution. Southern Company stands out among U.S. utilities for its proactive role in shaping these next-generation systems—not just as a future customer, but as a hands-on innovator.
Wilmer A. Coloma, Antonella L. Costa, Claubia Pereira, Clarysson A. M. da Silva
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 4 | April 2020 | Pages 554-564
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1662668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Analysis of the power time series evolution is used to investigate a stable or unstable process after the disturbance in a light water reactor of the boiling water reactor (BWR) type. Several different methodologies are currently used and the uncertainties of the various approaches are in some cases very different. In this work, the time series model known as the Autoregressive Moving Average model was used to calculate the decay ratio (DR), and the natural frequency (NF) due to power oscillations in a BWR. The method consists of locating the appropriate dominant pole of the transfer function. The autoregressive methods are quite often used to study the stability of BWR reactors. In this work the Box-Cox transformation is implemented to stabilize the variances of the power signals in order to maintain the linear assumptions that the calculation of DR and NF needs; that is, to correct biases in the distribution of errors to stabilize the variance and mainly so that the signal approaches a linear behavior. The MATLAB code was used for this purpose. This work also presents a nonlinear analysis of the power series, determining the values of the largest Lyapunov exponents with Rosenstein’s algorithm in order to analyze the stability of the system. The results of the DR and NF calculated by the used methodology are very close to the values obtained in the benchmark.