Chengqi Wang Wins Best Paper Award at NUTHOS-13
The Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory would like to congratulate Chengqi Wang on his recent award at the 13th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics, Operation, and Safety (NUTHOS-13, 2022). The paper, titled “Benchmark of RANS Simulations against LES for Helium Flow in Mini-zigzag Channels”, looks at Printed Circuit Heat Exchangers (PCHEs). They are fabricated using a combination of chemical etching and diffusion bonding to produce a much smaller heat exchanger than traditional designs. PCHE application to nuclear power plants can dramatically reduce the system volume, lower capital costs, and improve nuclear reactor safety. As with any expensive piece of equipment, modeling is vital to work out design details without having to build numerous prototypes. Limited experimental data and lack of validated models makes this even more challenging. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is primarily used for these types of analyses, but choosing an appropriate turbulence model is crucial for the reliability of the simulation results, and thereafter the final conclusion. Three prevalent turbulence models were compared against a high-resolution Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to determine which provides the best agreement under what conditions. Helium flow in mini-zigzag channels was used as a reference case to test three Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) type turbulence models, namely: realizable k-epsilon, k-omega SST, and Reynolds Stress Transport (RST). The findings will not only help readers evaluate existing CFD simulations, but also provide a guideline for conducting future PCHE investigations using CFD. Congratulations to Chengqi, and his co-authors Koroush Shirvan and Xiaodong Sun, for producing the winning paper.
April 14, 2022:
Meredith Eaheart Selected for University Nuclear Leadership Program Fellowship
The Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory would like to congratulate Meredith Eaheart on being selected for the FY21 University Nuclear Leadership Program Fellowship. This is a very competitive program from the Department of Energy for nuclear engineering students. Only 28 fellowships were offered this year, and Meredith has been selected for the only one in the entire state of Michigan. Congratulations to Meredith for winning this highly sought after award. During the course of her PhD program, Meredith will conduct research on the thermal-hydraulic aspects of the Transformational Challenge Reactor in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After graduate school, she hopes to contribute to the design and implementation of an advanced reactor design. Read the full story on the NERS website.
August 20, 2020:
Sheng Zhang Wins Best Paper Award at ICONE 2020
The Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory would like to congratulate Sheng Zhang on his recent award at ICONE 2020. Sheng won the Best Paper-North America Award in the Student Paper Competition for his paper on tritium management in Fluoride salt-cooled High-temperature Reactors (FHRs) using Fluted-Tube Heat eXchangers (FT-HXs). Congratulations to Sheng, and his co-authors Xiao Wu and Xiaodong Sun, for producing the winning paper.