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.
Division Spotlight
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Attila Kiss, Attila Aszódi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 40-53
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9444
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes have become promising tools for the investigation of thermal hydraulics in revolutionary reactor concepts in the last decade. In Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes calculations, the CFD codes (for example, the ANSYS CFX code used here) use turbulence modeling, wall functions, and other approaches. Therefore, the accuracy of CFD codes for water flow under supercritical conditions has to be examined. The first aim of this work is to investigate the effects of different material property definition methods on the numerical results obtained with CFX code. The second aim is to assess the accuracy of the conventional turbulence models (such as k-, k-, and SST) under supercritical water conditions. The results and comparison of three independent validations for supercritical water flow in vertical smooth-bore tubes with upward flow direction are presented in this paper. It is well known that the material properties strongly depend on the temperature and the pressure near and above the thermodynamic critical point. It is demonstrated that rather than analytical or discrete point methods, the IAPWS-IF97 material table best represents the strongly changing material properties. A nonaxialsymmetric effect on result fields was not found based on the three validations; therefore, a rotational periodic or two-dimensional grid approach is recommended for further validations of homogenously heated, vertically installed, smooth-bore straight tubes cooled by supercritical water. The calculation results have been compared with measurements, and the computational errors for the three validations were found to be in the ranges of 0 to 25%, 0 to 18%, and 2 to 40% for the Swenson, Yamagata, and Herkenrath experiments, respectively. The results of the three validations indicate the need to improve a turbulence model to take into account the buoyancy effect on the turbulence for thermal-hydraulic calculations of the supercritical water.