Uncollided Flux

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.