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
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Iztok Tiselj, Cedric Flageul, Jure Oder (Jožef Stefan Inst), invited
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1050-1065
The paper discusses the most accurate methods for description of turbulent flows: computationally very expensive Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and, slightly less accurate and slightly less expensive, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method. Both methods have found the way into the nuclear thermal hydraulics as tools for studies of the fundamental mechanisms of turbulence and turbulent heat transfer. In the first Section of the paper, both methods are briefly introduced in parallel with the basic properties of the turbulent flows. The focus is on DNS method, the so-called quasi-DNS approach, and the coarsest turbulence modelling approach discussed in this work, which is still on the very small scale, wall-resolved LES. Other, coarser turbulence modeling approaches (such as wall-modelled LES, RANS/LES hybrids, or RANS) are beyond the scope of the present paper. Section 2. answers the question: "How do DNS and LES methods work?", with a short discussion of the computational requirements, numerical approaches and computational tools. Section 3. is about the interpretation of the DNS and LES results and statistical uncertainties. Sections 4. and 5. give some examples of the DNS and wall-resolved LES results relevant for nuclear thermal hydraulics. The last section lists the conclusions and some of the challenges, which might be tackled with the most accurate techniques like DNS and LES.