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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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Latest News
Terrestrial Energy, Schneider partner on molten salt reactor
Terrestrial Energy and Schneider Electric are teaming to deploy Terrestrial Energy's integral molten salt reactor (IMSR) to provide zero-emission power to industrial facilities and large data centers.
The companies signed a memorandum of understanding in April to jointly develop commercial opportunities with high-energy users looking for reliable, affordable, and zero-carbon baseload supply. Terrestrial Energy said that working with Schneider “offers solutions to the major energy challenges faced by data center operators and many heavy industries operating a wide range of industrial processes such as hydrogen, ammonia, aluminum, and steel production.”
Cihang Lu, Zeyun Wu, Xu Wu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 692-710
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1805259
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermal stratification (TS) is a thermal-fluid phenomenon that can introduce large uncertainties to nuclear reactor safety. The stratified layers caused by TS can lead to temperature oscillations in the reactor core. They can also result in damages to both the reactor vessel and in-vessel components due to the growth of thermal fatigue cracks. More importantly, TS can impede the establishment of natural circulation, which is widely used for passive cooling and ensures the inherent safety of numerous reactor designs. A fast-running one-dimensional (1-D) model was recently developed in our research group to predict the TS phenomenon in pool-type sodium-cooled fast reactors. The efficient 1-D model provided reasonable temperature predictions for the test conditions investigated, but nonnegligible discrepancies between the 1-D predictions and the experimental temperature measurements were observed. These discrepancies are attributed to the model uncertainties (also known as model bias or errors) in the 1-D model and the parameter uncertainties in the input parameters.
In this study, we first recognized through a forward uncertainty analysis that the observed discrepancies between the computational predictions and the experimental temperature measurements could not be explained solely by input uncertainty propagation. We then performed an inverse uncertainty quantification (UQ) study to reduce the model uncertainties of the 1-D model using a modular Bayesian approach based on experimental data. Inverse UQ serves as a data assimilation process to simultaneously minimize the mismatches between the predictions and experimental measurements, while quantifying the associated parameter uncertainties. The solutions of the modular Bayesian approach were in the form of posterior probability density functions, which were explored by rigorous Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. Results showed that the quantified parameters obtained from the inverse UQ effectively improved the predictive capability of the 1-D TS model.