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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
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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February 2024
Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Andrej Prošek, Boštjan Končar, Matjaž Leskovar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1661-1674
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1562820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prediction of highly turbulent flows using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools is not an easy task. Besides the uncertainty in the choice of turbulence model parameters, the physical properties of the fluid and experimental boundary conditions also can be largely affected by uncertainties. The objective of the study is uncertainty quantification of CFD simulation to obtain figures of merits, downstream velocity, and turbulence kinetic energy. The water-mixing experiment in the GEneric MIxing Experiment (GEMIX) facility performed at Paul Scherrer Institute is used as a benchmark case. The NEPTUNE_CFD code that solves Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations with k-eps turbulence model has been used to perform a series of simulations. For uncertainty quantification with the Monte Carlo method the Optimal Statistical Estimator (OSE) was used for response surface (RS) generation from the set of CFD calculations. The results of the uncertainty analysis show that OSE is a very suitable method for RS generation, which is then used in uncertainty analysis using the Monte Carlo method to determine the 5% lower limit and 95% upper limit with 95% confidence level. In this way, the impact of some sources of uncertainty is evaluated. Also, OSE can reproduce the CFD simulation with high accuracy at the CFD calculation points, even in the case when only 5 out of 40 calculation points are used for RS generation. The results further suggest that it is very important to perform accurate reference calculation and select appropriate ranges of variation for uncertain input parameters.