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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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Giovanni Maronati, Bojan Petrovic (Georgia Tech)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 763-771
In this work, a thermal hydraulic analysis with RELAP5-3D/ver.40.3 of the Decay Heat Removal System (DHRS) for the Integral Inherently Safe Light Water Reactor (I2S-LWR) is discussed. The I2S-LWR is an integral reactor characterized by a high level of safety. The DHRS of the reactor is a passive safety system and it is made up of four independent trains, each composed of an Intermediate Heat Exchanger (IHX), placed in the reactor pressure vessel, an intermediate loop with pressurized water (at 70 bar) as working fluid and an Air Heat Exchanger (AHX), that rejects the residual power to the ambient air. The study consisted in modeling the I2S-LWR primary loop through the RELAP5-3D code in order to design the DHRS and analyze the shutdown transient under the Loss of Offsite Power Conditions.
The coupling system IHX-AHX has been optimized maximizing the rejected power to the ultimate heat sink under natural circulation, replacing the reactor core with two time dependent volumes with imposed temperature. The IHX has been designed limiting its dimensions to the available space in the reactor pressure vessel, while the required dimensions of the AHX, since it is not subject to space limitations, have been determined during the study.
The shutdown transient is described starting from the reactor core under nominal operating conditions and simulating the primary and secondary pump coast down with decreasing exponential functions. The analysis showed that the DHRS is capable of removing the residual power from the reactor core safely, accepting a failure of up to two trains of the DHRS. Furthermore, the presence of a fail-safe opening valve that isolates the IHX of the DHRS from the primary loop during nominal operation has been considered, showing a performance increase with the level of opening of the valve. Since the target of the DHRS is the removal of the decay power accepting the failure of one of the four trains, the AHX has been reduced in size to reach that target, in order to limit the cost of the heat exchanger.
An alternative working fluid for the intermediate loop, which consists of nanoparticles dispersed in water (nanofluid), has been evaluated. The use of nanoparticles improves the thermal properties of water through an increase in the heat transfer coefficient, but is characterized by a higher viscosity. The analysis confirmed that the bottleneck of the system is the heat transfer with ambient air in natural circulation, since the improvement in the exchanged power is not affected much by the enhancement of the thermal properties of the working fluid.