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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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.
Ki-Yong Choi, Seok Cho, Hyoung-Kyu Cho, Chul-Hwa Song
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 54-67
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9445
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 6 × 6 reflood test facility for Advanced Thermal Hydraulic Evaluation of Reflood phenomena (ATHER) has been operated by Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute to investigate the reflooding phenomena in a rod bundle. A series of bottom reflood tests was carried out by varying several parameters affecting the reflooding process such as the flooding velocity, inlet coolant subcooling, system pressure, initial maximum rod wall temperature, and rod power. Subsequently, counterpart reflood tests of rod bundle heat transfer data from The Pennsylvania State University were conducted for comparison, focusing especially on the effects of the heat flux on the peak cladding temperature (PCT) and the quenching behavior. The best-estimate thermal-hydraulic system analysis code MARS3.1 was assessed with the obtained data to investigate the parametric effects on its prediction accuracy. It was found that the prediction accuracy of the PCT is reasonable on the whole but that the MARS code predicts delayed quenching behavior compared with the data, especially for high heat flux conditions. In particular, the prediction becomes deteriorated downstream, far from the inlet of the test section.
