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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2023)
February 6–9, 2023
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2023
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
University of Florida-led consortium to research nuclear forensics
A 16-university team of 31 scientists and engineers, under the title Consortium for Nuclear Forensics and led by the University of Florida, has been selected by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop the next generation of new technologies and insights in nuclear forensics.
Jieun Lee, Paolo Balestra, Yassin A. Hassan, Robert Muyshondt, Duy Thien Nguyen, Richard Skifton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 12 | December 2022 | Pages 1769-1805
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2081482
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The verification and validation of Pronghorn is imperative for predicting the fluid velocity, pressure, and temperature in advanced reactors, specifically high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. Pronghorn is a coarse-mesh, intermediate-fidelity, multidimensional thermal-hydraulic code developed by Idaho National Laboratory. The Pronghorn incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are validated by using the pressure drop measurements and axial velocity averaged from the particle image velocimetry data obtained at the engineering-scale pebble bed facility at Texas A&M University.
Pronghorn and STAR-CCM+ porous media models using the Handley, Kerntechnischer Ausschuss, and Carman correlations comparably estimate the pressure drop better than other functions with a maximum 3.34% average relative difference compared to the experimental measurements. The precise average pebble bed porosity estimation has a large impact on the pressure drop. The implementation of the volume-averaged porosity in several sectors, with each sector’s thickness larger than the representative elementary length, has the potential to improve pressure drop modeling or provide more detailed velocity profiles in nuclear reactors with high aspect ratios. The wall effects can be considered using this approach, applying the relatively higher volume-averaged porosity near walls. In addition, the pressure gradients and volume- or surface-averaged axial velocities from the realizable two-layer and shear stress transport models are in good agreement with the porous media simulations and particle image velocimetry data.