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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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August 2024
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July 2024
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Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Paul K. Romano, Steven P. Hamilton, Ronald O. Rahaman, April Novak, Elia Merzari, Sterling M. Harper, Patrick C. Shriwise, Thomas M. Evans
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 4 | April 2021 | Pages 391-411
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1830620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
While the literature has numerous examples of Monte Carlo (MC) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) coupling, most are hardwired codes intended primarily for research rather than as stand-alone, general-purpose applications. In this work, we describe an open source application, the Exascale Nuclear Reactor Investigative COde (ENRICO), which enables coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic simulations between multiple codes that can be chosen at run time (as opposed to a coupling between two specific codes). The application has been designed such that the control flow logic, domain mapping, nonlinear fixed-point iteration, solution transfers, and convergence checks are all agnostic to the underlying physics solvers used. Special emphasis has also been placed on enabling efficient execution on distributed-memory computing environments. The transfer of solution fields between solvers is performed in memory rather than through filesystem input/output. Additionally, solvers can be configured to run on overlapping or disjoint sets of processes.
To date, coupling with the OpenMC and Shift MC codes, the Nek5000 CFD code, and a simplified heat diffusion and subchannel solver has been implemented in ENRICO. We present results for coupled simulations of a single light water reactor fuel assembly based on the NuScale reactor using various combinations of the physics solvers. For this problem, the coupled simulations are shown to converge in about four Picard iterations. A comparison of the heat source and temperature distributions computed by ENRICO using OpenMC coupled with Nek5000 and Shift coupled with Nek5000 illustrates remarkable agreement between the codes.