ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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 Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2024
Latest News
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
A. Uchibori, A. Watanabe, T. Takata, H. Ohshima
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 119-127
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1499323
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When pressurized water or vapor leaks from a failed heat transfer tube in a steam generator (SG) of sodium-cooled fast reactors, a high-velocity, high-temperature jet with sodium-water chemical reaction may cause wastage on the adjacent tubes. For safety assessment of the SG, a computational fluid dynamics code SERAPHIM, in which a compressible multicomponent multiphase flow with sodium-water chemical reaction is computed, has been developed. The original SERAPHIM code is based on the finite difference method. In this study, an unstructured mesh-based numerical method was developed and introduced into the SERAPHIM code to advance a numerical accuracy for a complex-shaped domain including multiple heat transfer tubes. The multiphase flow under the tube failure accident is calculated by the multifluid model considering compressibility. The governing equations are solved by the Highly Simplified Marker And Cell (HSMAC) method. The original HSMAC method was modified for compressible multiphase flows in the unstructured mesh. Validity of the unstructured mesh-based SERAPHIM code was investigated through the analysis of an underexpanded jet experiment, which is a key phenomenon in the tube failure accident. The calculated pressure profile showed good agreement with the experimental data. Numerical analysis of water vapor discharging into liquid sodium was also performed. The calculated behavior of the reacting jet agreed with the previous experimental knowledge. It was demonstrated that the proposed numerical method could be applicable to evaluation of the sodium-water reaction phenomenon.