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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Ming Ding, Xiaoyong Yang, Jie Wang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 3 | March 2010 | Pages 205-217
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recuperator is a key component and plays an important role in the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor combined with gas turbine (HTGR-GT) system. A distributed parameter model was proposed to study the dynamic characteristics of the recuperator of the HTGR-GT cycle, and this model was solved using an implicit arithmetic. Basic characteristics of the recuperator were analyzed using responses of the recuperator to step disturbances of temperature and mass flow. The response of the recuperator to the temperature disturbances has two different characteristic times 1 and 2 depending on the relation between the response and the disturbance. The response of the recuperator to mass flow disturbance has a characteristic time 4 that is between 1 and 2. An example of coupled disturbance of temperature and mass flow was simulated by the distributed parameter model. This example shows the influence of the three characteristic times to the dynamic characteristics of the recuperator. When the system power of HTGR-GT is regulated slowly, the core temperature distribution of the recuperator hardly varies. However, when the electric load of the system is rejected from full power, the core temperature, especially in the front of the recuperator, suffers from a drastic change in temperature.
