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.
News
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).
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.
Yaqi Wang: making leaps in radiation transport discretization techniques
Yaqi Wang (MS+PhD). My first PhD student! Back in 2006, we were among the first ones to do mesh adaptivity for Sn transport on unstructured grids, using high-order finite elements. Whoop!!! In addition, we developed a robust and useful diffusion-preconditioned for transport based on discontinuous finite elements. It is used in several radiation transport codes today. We published a total of 7 journal articles (and numerous conference proceedings).
Yaqi was hired as a staff by INL. He is now the lead architect of their neutronics code, RattleSNake, based on the MOOSE multiphysics platform.