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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.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Avinash Kumar Acharya, E. Hemanth Rao, M. Menaka, Sanjay Kumar Das, D. Ponraju, B. Venkatraman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 1351-1364
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2199079
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sodium boiling in a fuel subassembly of a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor is a very critical phenomenon as void propagation may lead to loss of heat removal and increase in reactivity. Hence, sodium boiling behavior from the incipient stage and evolution of bubble dynamics need to be thoroughly understood toward validating various thermal-hydraulic models pertaining to safety analysis of fast reactors. An experimental program has been taken up at Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research to investigate incipient sodium boiling toward spatiotemporal evaluation of bubble characteristics in sodium. Real-time X-ray radioscopy has been employed for in-sodium visualization of bubbles generated during sodium boiling. The raw images obtained during the experiment were processed using an in-house–developed image processing algorithm that includes background subtraction, noise filtering, and segmentation techniques for enhancement of foreground features. A max filter–based tracker is also devised for clear depiction of bubble boundary and motion with time during the boiling process. Attributes like bubble diameter, nucleation site density, and bubble velocity are determined effectively from the captured images using the algorithm. The paper focuses on the experiment, imaging technique using X-ray radioscopy, and image processing toward depicting the bubble characteristics during sodium boiling in a vertical channel.