Peter German (PhD).
Fluid Flows
Marco Delchini: methods for two-phase flows
Marco Delchini (MS+PhD). Marco worked on artificial viscosity methods for fluid flows in various setting: single phase, two phases (using a 7-equation model with Pliq /= Pgas), and coupled radiation hydrodynamics. Artificial viscosity techniques aim at combatting non physical oscillations observed in numerical simulations. These spurious oscillations in the numerical solution are caused by the methods’ inability to reproduce the true entropy production. Marco’s work has led to 5 journal publications.
Marco now works at ORNL.
Joshua Hansel: Bringing FCT to the transport community
Joshua Hansel (MS+PhD). For his MS, Josh worked on subchannel model development in ORNL’s AMP code. For his PhD, we investigated the intriguing work of Flux-Corrected Transport (FCT) and its application to radiation transport. Even though FCT has ‘flux’ and ‘transport’ in its name, it is a technique developed for fluid flow applications, aiming at mitigating spurious oscillations appearing at shock locations. We brought FCT to the transport world, but it was not an easy task! Josh’s work led to 1 journal publication.
Josh is now a staff member at INL, in the MOOSE and RELAP-7 teams.
Great Masters, great deeds.
In this post, I summarize of the excellent work carried out by my MS students up to today!
Don Bruss (MS). Worked on diffusion synthetic acceleration for the positivity-preserving discretization of Peter Maginot. This work led to 1 journal article. Don continued on with a PhD, working with Dr. Morel. Don is now employed at Sandia.
Alex Chambers (MS). Great work on burning minor actinides in modified PWR fuel assemblies.We published 1 journal article! Alex went on to work for KAPL (naval propulsion lab).
Matt Sternat (MS). We tacked the difficult problem of identifying smuggled nuclear material using an optimization framework. Matt obtained his PhD from TAMU under Dr. Charlton and went on to work at Sandia (SNL).
Nate Fredette (MS). Continued the work by Sternat on smuggled nuclear material trafficking. Went on to work at KAPL.
Chris Chance (MS). Worked on subchannel flow methodology for partial flow blockage for fuel assemblies (we had an experiment at our TRIGA reactor where we inserted a neutron detector, hence blocking coolant flow that required safety analysis). Chris went on to work at Duke Energy.
Tim Rogers (MS). Work on Simulated Annealing to determine the optimum Gd-bear pin layout in PWR fuel assemblies. Today, we would call this Machine Learning to use the current buzzwords! We published 1 journal article. Tim went on to work at Duke Energy.
Joshua Smith (MS). Performed reactor physics (fuel assembly + core) analysis to assess the neutronic impact of doping UOX fuel with BeO, a thermal conductivity enhancer. Josh went on to work at Duke Energy.
Logan Scott (MS). Worked on modeling the hodoscope (collimator) of INL’s TREAT Reactor. Logan is now a post-baccalaureate at ORNL.
Rob Turner (MS). Is extending the PWLD finite element discretization to use a quadratic term in z. Great to reduce the number of unknowns in extruded geometries, such as the ones used in reactor physics. Has not graduated yet.
Matt Marciniak (MS). Welcome to the MOOSE zoo. We are coupling RELAP-7/BISON/RATTLESNAKE to model the MHTGR-350 core. Has not graduated yet.
Andrew Hermosillo (MS). Special nuclear material smugglers beware! We are working on an isotope ratio method to catch nefarious reactor uses. Has not yet graduated.
Vijay Mahadevan: Modern multiphysics !!!
Vijay Mahadevan (MS+PhD). My second PhD student. What great fun we had developing KARMA (Kode for Advanced Reactor Modeling and Analysis), making making high-end third party libraries (libmesh, PETSc, SLEPc, gmsh, tinyxml, …) talk to one another. KARMA was a mini-MOOSE, which we started independently of INL at around the same time. We did a lot of JFNK and Aitken-accelerated Picard and published 2 journal articles.
Vijay became a Givens Fellow at Argonne National Lab (ANL). Receiving a mathematical post-doctoral award is an outstanding achievement for a nuclear engineering. Well done breaking all sorts of barriers! Vijay was then hired by ANL and leads the SIGMA project.