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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Jean-Francois Wald, Bertrand Iooss
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 12 | December 2025 | Pages 2987-3003
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2025.2529125
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study proposes to quantify the uncertainty in a CPU time costly computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model used to evaluate the local temperature field in the situation of blocked fuel assembly in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) transfer tube. Several uncertain parameters are identified and a first uncertainty propagation study is conducted on a low-fidelity (poorly refined) mesh for CPU cost issues. Then, using the concept of “support points,” an algorithm is employed to reduce the size of the initial design of experiments. A high-fidelity model (finer mesh, more CPU time expensive) is then run on this small-size design of experiments. A metamodel was finally built on those high-fidelity results to propagate uncertainties and finely analyze the results. The successful results that are obtained show that metamodeling has the potential to overcome the issue of costly CPU time CFD models in the near future. Despite good quantitative results, the main purpose of the present study remains the novel methodology that was set up for uncertainty propagation in CFD.