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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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
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.
Kadir Kavaklioglu, Belle R. Upadhyaya
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 70-84
Technical Paper | Reactor Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A methodology for designing membership functions for fuzzy controllers has been developed and demonstrated with application to feedwater heater level control. This method, namely simulated annealing, assumes that the rule base is determined by an expert who is knowledgeable about the process to be controlled. Although this method is applicable to any type of fuzzy controller, max-min center-average fuzzy controllers with triangular and trapezoidal membership functions were used due to the ease of implementation of this combination. This method essentially performs a random search for the parameters of the membership functions that yield the minimum squared error between the plant outputs and their setpoints for a given test signal as a disturbance. A major dimensionality reduction is accomplished through the identification of some requirements on membership functions. A significant improvement is made in handling membership function constraints that allows the use of every generated solution in the search process. The proposed methodology was applied to the control of cascade-arranged feedwater heaters that are currently controlled by individual pneumatic proportional-only controllers. An optimal fuzzy control system was developed for controlling the levels in this system for a typical load-following transient. The optimal fuzzy controller was found to improve rise time and settling time and to decrease the overshoot in the desired level.