The NEST HYMERES (Hydrogen Containment Experiments for Reactor Safety) and PANDA project, spearheaded by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, focuses on studying safety-critical phenomena within containment structures during accidents. It provides hands-on training opportunities during experimental test campaigns conducted at the PSI PANDA facility, renowned as one of the most advanced containment test facilities globally. Simultaneously, the project aims to foster exploratory research initiatives under the mentorship of experts from participating organisations, with a particular emphasis on collaboration with universities.
The NEST HYMERES and PANDA project has been created as the educational component of the NEA HYMERES-2 joint project (2017-2020) and the OECD/NEA PANDA joint project (2021-2025).
The HYMERES-2 project is a major international project contributing to the extension of the experimental database on containment phenomena and on suppression pool issues.
The overall project scope is:
The PANDA project is a follow-up of the HYMERES-2 project, and its general objective is to advance the knowledge on the containment of thermal-hydraulics associated with the following four topics:
The NEA joint projects such as HYMERES-2 and PANDA benefit from a broad range of technical and scientific expertise in an international framework and are based on experimental and computational activities which have a potential to serve also as driving force for educational activities.
Within the NEST HYMERES and PANDA project experimental and computational research activities have been carried out by NEST Fellows. The objectives of the NEST Fellow activities are:
Moreover, the NEST Fellows have the possibility to present the results of their activities in the HYMERES-2 and PANDA project meetings and in seminars organised at PSI.
The short presentation of the NEST Fellows can be found here.