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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
X-energy receives federal tax credit for TRISO fuel facility
Advanced reactor company X-energy has been awarded $148.5 million in tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act for construction of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Dan G. Cacuci, Ruixian Fang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 85-131
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1294429
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For counter-flow mechanical draft cooling towers, the air in the fill can reach the point of saturation before leaving the fill section. The heat and mass transfer to the saturated air by evaporative cooling inside the fill are modeled with some assumptions and with over 50 parameters for boundary conditions, cooling tower geometries, heat and mass transfer correlations, water and air thermal properties, etc. Because of the parameter uncertainties and modeling assumptions, the accuracy and reliability of the cooling tower model need to be evaluated by quantifying the uncertainties associated with the model output. First, sensitivities of the model output with respect to all the model parameters need to be analyzed. Based on the cooling tower model, this work developed adjoint sensitivity models for the saturated case to compute efficiently and exactly the sensitivities of the model responses to all model parameters by applying the general adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology for nonlinear systems. The solution of the adjoint sensitivity models are independently verified. With the sensitivities known, the model parameters can be ranked in their importance for contributing to response uncertainties. The propagation of the uncertainties in the model parameters to the uncertainties in the model outputs can be evaluated. By further applying the predictive modeling for coupled multiphysics systems methodology, the cooling tower model for the saturated case can be improved by reducing the model prediction uncertainties through assimilation of experimental measurements and calibration of model parameters.