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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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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Mauricio Tano, Pablo Rubiolo (Univ of Grenoble-Alpes), Julien Giraud, Veronique Ghetta (LPSC, CNRS/IN2P3)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 533-542
Inverse problem methods deal with the evaluation of the causal factors that result on a set of measurements or observations. Inverse problems found in nuclear reactors involve non-linear and coupled physical phenomena, making the causation effects complicated to de assessed. Furthermore, the extent of the experimental data collected is limited and this data is subjected to experimental noise. In the following paper, a method for solving inverse problems in nuclear reactors with coupled physical phenomena is developed. In the proposed approach, the inverse problem is solved through the minimization of a performance function. The minimization of this performance function is achieved with a preconditioned gradient descendent method. The generalized gradient of the performance function is obtained using the adjoint of the multiphysics equations of the system. Furthermore, for reducing the sensitivity to noise of the inverse problem, a preconditioner based in a Kalman Filter is developed. As an example, the methodology is applied for solving the inverse problem of finding the heat flux in the wall of a natural convection experiment.