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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.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Securing the advanced reactor fleet
Physical protection accounts for a significant portion of a nuclear power plant’s operational costs. As the U.S. moves toward smaller and safer advanced reactors, similar protection strategies could prove cost prohibitive. For tomorrow’s small modular reactors and microreactors, security costs must remain appropriate to the size of the reactor for economical operation.
Alexander Heifetz, Richard Vilim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 189 | Number 3 | March 2015 | Pages 268-277
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-113
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) recompression cycle is a power conversion cycle compatible with intermediate-temperature nuclear reactors. The main advantage of the S-CO2 cycle is relatively high efficiency (∼47% at the turbine inlet temperature of 650°C). The dynamic characteristics and control of this cycle remain areas of active research because of the cycle's unique features, in particular, large fluid property changes near the critical point. This paper reports the conceptual development of a dynamic S-CO2 recompression cycle controller designed to efficiently respond to a demand for reduction of generator electric power. The S-CO2 cycle generator electric power production can be controlled using either turbine bypass (TB) or mass inventory (MI) controllers. Turbine bypass is a fast response controller, which reduces generator power by opening the TB valve. Mass inventory is a slow response controller, with a time constant an order of magnitude larger than that of the TB controller. The MI controller reduces generator electric power through decreasing the inventory of CO2 gas in the cycle by pumping some of the gas into a storage reservoir. Both TB and MI controllers operate in conjunction with a precooler temperature controller, which maintains compressor inlet conditions near the critical point. Although using a TB controller allows for quick reduction of the generator electric power, S-CO2 cycle thermal efficiency is reduced during the steady-state operation. Cycle efficiency can be improved if cycle control is transitioned from the TB to the MI controller. However, directly switching from the TB to the MI controller would result in a spike in generator power because of the large discrepancy between the time constants of the two cycle control modes. To address this deficiency, we have designed a mixed-mode (MM) controller to transfer cycle control to MI mode after steady state has been reached in TB mode. In the MM controller, both TB and MI controllers operate simultaneously, thus maintaining nearly constant generator electric power during S-CO2 cycle control transitioning. Design of an MM controller for the S-CO2 cycle does not appear to have been previously reported in literature. To test our controller design, we have performed proof-of-concept numerical experiments. All controllers in this study were implemented as proportional-integral controllers using the System Control Module (SCM) language. Gain coefficients for all controllers were determined via numerical experiments, in which response of the S-CO2 cycle was calculated with the GPASS (General Plant Analyzer and System Simulator) software package. Gain coefficients and cycle timescales were calculated under idealized conditions of instantaneous measurement response.