Faculty and staff news

The American Nuclear Society's (ANS) Operations and Power Division awarded Professor Vicki Bier the best presentation award at its annual meeting in June. Bier received the honor for her presentation about the effects of electricity deregulation on nuclear power safety at the ANS session, "Business Planning for License Renewal and Plant Acquisitions."

Bier also was an invited keynote speaker at the 2001 EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) International Maintenance Conference, "Maintaining Reliable Electric Generation," Aug. 14-16 in Houston, Texas. The keynote session was devoted to discussion of emerging pressures of the new marketplace for electricity. Bier's talk highlighted preventive maintenance strategies for deregulation.

In June, Assistant Professor Rob Carpick received the best overall presentation award at the American Society for Engineering Education's annual meeting. The presentation, part of the mechanics division, was titled "An Animated Mechanics Classroom." He also recently received $25,000 from the American Chemical Society's Petroleum Research Fund. The grant will support one of Carpick's graduate students who, with Biological Systems Engineering Assistant Professor Frank Denes, is performing research on how to combine mechanics and chemistry to control nanoscale textures of polymer surfaces.

The American Nuclear Society's (ANS) Thermal Hydraulics Division (THD) has selected Professor Michael Corradini as the recipient of its 2001 Technical Achievement Award. The award is the highest honor the division bestows and is presented annually to a THD member to recognize outstanding technical achievement. Corradini received the award and presented a paper about critical heat flux in narrow gaps at the ANS winter meeting.

A group of nuclear engineering researchers recently received $1.4 million over three years from the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (NERI) program to study ways to achieve higher thermal efficiency in reactors cooled by supercritical water. Using plasma-source ion implantation techniques, group members hope to improve corrosion and wear resistance in high-temperature materials and will use neutronics analyses to improve fuel-cycle versatility with these materials. To develop predictive tools, they will study issues associated with coolant-density changes in supercritical water circulation. The group includes Corradini, Assistant Professor Paul Wilson and associate scientists Kumar Sridharan and Mark Anderson, as well as collaborators from Argonne National Laboratory and GE subsidiary Global Nuclear Fuel.

Sridharan (PI) and Professor Noah Hershkowitz (co-PI) received a $33,000 grant from Sandia National Labs to perform studies on deposition of low surface energy, wear-resistant films on microelectromechanical structures (MEMS) devices. The two will deposit diamondlike carbon (DLC) and fluorine-modified DLC films, hoping to mitigate adhesion between MEMS devices — a major problem because of the devices' high surface-to-volume ratio. They will use non-line-of-sight, plasma-source ion implantation/film deposition to achieve conformal deposition. Sridharan has also received a $15,000 UIR grant to conduct collaborative research with Thermal Spray Technologies of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on pore infiltration in thermally sprayed coatings using low-pressure plasma techniques.

Congratulations to Professor Gil Emmert and Reactor Director Dick Cashwell on their recent retirements!