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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
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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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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Anthony L. Crawford, Thomas Ulrich, Victor Walker (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 166-173
This paper presents an innovative collaborative haptic-hand user interface which employs a novel method to recognize the real-time geometric hand parameters of each individual user (e.g. finger lengths, joint locations, hand posture, etc.). The novelty of this method is that unlike conventional user interfaces (e.g. keyboard or mouse), which only allow human-machine information transfer via one dimensional interactions at the finger-tips, this system has the potential to interpret the intent of a user’s movement by resourcing additionally harvested hand gesture information. The high number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and complexity associated with the hand make it ideal for use to control or communicate particularities associated with multi-variable complex physics system such as the that of a nuclear reactor or it’s sub-systems. Despite the fact that unconventional hand gesture monitoring systems are available (e.g. cyber grasp and Leap Motion) they lack the full haptic bi-lateral communication provided by the developed system and/or the methods to identify the hand gestures are restricted by a glove, which is cumbersome, or visual means, which are subject to intermittent data due to shadowing effects. Highly enabling particularities associated with the device include 3-DOF haptic feedback at the finger-tips, high-rate (>1kHz) FPGA based position and force monitoring, and the patented efficient user hand geometry calibration method. The efficient method, based on sphere mathematics and statistical confidence, only requires ~10 seconds of the user fluttering their fingers to achieve its calibration aim. The consequential gesture information was shown to both directly communicate gesture to a robotic hand and promises more full bilateral haptic communication between the user’s hand and their cognition than any other device available.