Zach Prince (MS+PhD).
Transport
Patrick Behne: MOR with ML is even better
Patrick Behne (PhD).
Logan Harbour: ray tracing for transport
Logan Harbour (MS+PhD).
Tarek Ghaddar: LegoLand is not real. Let’s do better
Tarek Ghaddar (MS+PhD).
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.
Mike Hackemack: polygons/polyhedral are fun!
Mike Hackemack (PhD). Mike worked on Sn transport discretizations for arbitrary polygons/polyhedra. We notably extended Adams’ PWLD method to a quadratic serendipity version. Mike also worked on diffusion synthetic acceleration and mesh adaptivity, in direct continuation of the PhD work of Yaqi and Bruno. Mike’s work led to 1 journal publication.
Mike is now staff member at KAPL (naval propulsion lab).
Peter Maginot: High-order radiative transfer
Peter Maginot (MS+PhD). For his MS, Peter worked on positivity-preserving discretizations of the transport equation (positivity of the solution in important in of itself, but lack thereof can cause serious numerical problems, for instance, in radiative transfer applications). For his PhD, Peter continued working on quadrature-based positivity and developed a high-order in space+time code for radiative transfer. His work led to 3 journal articles.
Peter went on to LLNL, first as a post-doc, then as a staff member. He is now at LANL.
Yunhuang Zhang: Space Vehicle Re-entry
Yunhuang Zhang (MS+PhD). After completing his MS under my advisement working on fuel assembly design for minor actinides depletion, Yunhuang work on thermal radiation for space vehicle re-entry (Orion type), co-advised jointly by Dr. Morel and myself. This research topic was part of a large PSAAP (Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program) grant from the DOE/NNSA. His work led to 1 journal article.
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.
Bruno Turcksin: charged particle transport!
Bruno Turcksin (PhD). We extended Yaqi’s work on Diffusion Synthetic Accelerators for Sn transport in bold ways: applying it to highly forward peaked scattering (as found in electron transport) and making it work on arbitrary polyhedral meshes! We published 2 journal articles.
Bruno is now a staff member at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL).