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2014 Awards

NSE Awards Archive

NSE’s Jake Jurewicz wins best student paper award at NUTHOS10

NSE graduate student Jake Jurewicz has won the award for the best student paper submitted to the 10th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Thermal Hydraulics, Operation and Safety (NUTHOS10). Jurewicz’s paper describes the detailed design of a spar-type platform for an offshore floating nuclear power plant.He presented the paper to an international audience at the conference in Okinawa, Japan on December 18th.

At MIT Jurewicz works with Professors Jacopo Buongiorno, Michael Golay, and Neil Todreas in a multidisciplinary group that studies various technical aspects of an offshore floating nuclear plant (OFNP). This relatively new and growing group, which also includes students from MIT’s Ocean Engineering Center, assesses a broad range of topics including plant security, refueling, power cycle optimization, safety systems, public opinion, and economics.

Jurewicz has been working closely with each member of the group over the last year and a half to fully integrate the design of the offshore platform with all of the nuclear systems and design constraints raised by the group members. His research, along with the rest of the OFNP group, is seeking to develop a new paradigm of safety and construction efficiency in nuclear plant design.

OFNP wiki
Floating nuclear plants could ride out tsunamis

NSE’s Andrew Dykhuis wins best Technical Content award for presentation in Sapporo

NSE graduate student Andrew Dykhuis has won the award for the best technical content for a student poster at the 2014 Nuclear Plant Chemistry Conference in Sapporo.

Dykhuis’s winning poster was entitled "Three Dimensional Multiphysics Modeling and Validation of CRUD-Induced Localized Corrosion (CILC) in PWRs”, and describes Dykhuis’s work in NSE Professor Michael Short’s lab.

Dykhuis and Short are developing a science-based, mechanistic, multiscale finite-element model of Zircaloy corrosion to investigate the behavior of various Zircaloys under a range of applicable conditions and accidents. The new model, known as HOGNOSE, links together detailed simulations of the effects of CRUD (an abbreviation for ‘Chalk River Unidentified Deposits’) on cladding and Zircaloy corrosion, thereby simulating CRUD-cladding behavior under both operating and accident conditions.

In contrast with other corrosion models HOGNOSE uses a variety of mechanistic parameters to tune the simulation, including three-dimensional simulations to predict the effects of a CRUD flake on the corrosion of the cladding beneath it.

Multiphysics Modeling & Simulation of Porous CRUD Deposits in PWRs
Short Lab

NSE’s Lulu Li wins best poster award at CASL workshop

NSE graduate student Lulu Li has won the award for the best poster presented at the 2014 CASL Annual Education Workshop. Li’s poster described a new physics-based multi-grid acceleration method implemented and tested in the OpenMOC framework.

At MIT Li works with Professors Kord Smith and Benoit Forget in the Computational Reactor Physics Group (CRPG). CRPG focuses on computational physics methods for modeling and simulation of nuclear reactor cores, including reactor physics analysis methods, core loading design and optimization, and transient safety analysis.

Li is one of the co-developers of the open-source Method of Characteristics neutron transport code called OpenMOC. Her research on nonlinear acceleration techniques is contributing to the development of the numerical algorithms and acceleration schemes that are necessary for efficient simulation of reactor problems.

CASL is the US Department of Energy’s Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors. It connects fundamental research and technology development through an integrated partnership of government, academia, and industry that extends across the nuclear energy enterprise.

Learn more about CRPG
Learn more about CASL

Colin Josey awarded NEUP Fellowship

NSE's Colin Josey was one of 33 graduate students across the country to be awarded a Nuclear Energy University Programs Fellowship given by the US Department of Energy. Josey is working on the development of new methods to handle Doppler broadening for Monte Carlo methods in the resolved resonance range. Current techniques require large amounts of memory to work, which is at a premium in planned supercomputers. By implementing the Windowed Multipole formalism in OpenMC, he hopes to reduce memory requirements and improve performance when studying reactors operating at hot full power. Josey works with NSE Professors Benoit Forget and Kord Smith.

As an NEUP graduate fellow, Josey will receive $50,000 annually over the next three years in addition to a summer internship at a National Laboratory.

Learn more about NEUP Fellowships and Scholarships

Benjamin Lawrence Magolan wins Rickover Fellowship

NSE graduate Benjamin Lawrence Magolan was recently awarded a Rickover Fellowship in Nuclear Engineering. Magolan is a first year graduate student in NSE, whose research focuses on the implementation of the linear and quadratic k-epsilon turbulence model into Hydra-TH, an advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code being developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the CASL project. This model will better capture the anisotropy of turbulent flows in rod bundle channels. His work consists of programming and implementing the model into the Hydra-TH software, in addition to verifying and validating these contributions via numerous simulations and by comparison to other turbulence models, CFD software, and experimental results. Magolan works with Professor Emilio Baglietto in NSE.

The Rickover Fellowship provides 24 months of funding for students enrolled in a full-time masters degree program and 48 months of funding for those in a doctoral degree program. The Fellowship is designed to meet the needs of the Naval Reactors Division of the Department of Energy for appropriately trained personnel for the maintenance and development of science and engineering technology as it pertains to naval nuclear propulsion.

Learn more about the Rickover Fellowship in Nuclear Engineering

2014 NSE Awards

The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the student chapter of the American Nuclear Society hosted the annual awards dinner on on May 14, 2014. Meet the award winners.

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Three MIT freshmen win Best Undergraduate Paper award at 2014 ANS Student Conference

Three MIT freshmen, Stephanie Pavlick, Jasmeet Arora, and Davis Tran, have won the Best Undergraduate Paper Award at the 2014 American Nuclear Society Student Conference. Their paper was selected from the 57 undergraduate papers presented at the conference.

The paper, “Lattice Benchmark Verification of OpenMOC”, drew on six months of research by the team of freshmen, in which they developed models of the BEAVRS Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) benchmark for deterministic neutron transport calculations. Their work is a significant step forward in verifying the accuracy of the OpenMOC neutron transport code for full-core reactor physics simulations. OpenMOC is being developed by MIT's Computational Reactor Physics Group, led by NSE Professors Ben Forget and Kord Smith. The freshmen were mentored by NSE graduate student Will Boyd.

In 2013, the ANS student conference was organized and hosted in Boston by the MIT ANS Student Chapter.

Yan Chen

NSE’s Yan Chen wins two prestigious awards

NSE graduate student Yan Chen has been selected to receive a Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future fellowship and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad.

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