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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Mathieu Martin, Daniel Leonard, R. Brian Jackson, K. Michael Steer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 9 | September 2020 | Pages 1325-1336
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1727263
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
TerraPower participated in a cooperative project among industry, a national laboratory, and a university to perform verification and validation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods for predicting the flow and heat transfer within fuel assemblies with hexagonally packed wire-wrapped fuel pins. This project consisted of both experimental and numerical components and used surrogate fluids and electrically heated fuel pins to substitute for liquid metal and nuclear fuel. TerraPower performed CFD simulations of the experiments using industrial-level Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) turbulence modeling. These simulations of helically wire-wrapped fuel assemblies employed meshes of bare pins without the wire-wrap geometry explicitly modeled. Instead, the effect of the wire-wrap on the flow is accounted for by introducing a momentum source (MS) into the governing fluid equations.
Solution validation was conducted by benchmarking the CFD simulations to the heated bundle experiments. These simulations used the as-tested boundary and operating conditions but were conducted blind. Pressure drop measurements and local temperature measurements were compared.
Axial pressure drop simulation results compared well with the experiment measurements. The vast majority of the local CFD temperatures matched thermocouple measurements within the instrument uncertainty. The good agreement between simulation and experiment supports the use of RANS-based CFD simulation methods and the specific applied MS method to model wire-wrapped fuel assemblies.