Faculty and staff news

The American Nuclear Society has appointed Professor James Blanchard as secretary/treasurer of its executive committee on fusion energy. Assistant Professor Paul Wilson was elected to the fusion energy committee. Executive committee members serve three-year terms.

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Research Development and Simulation has awarded a group led by Associate Professor Riccardo Bonazza $1.7 million over three years for its project, "Investigation of the Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov Instabilities." The group includes Associate Scientist Mark Anderson, Mechanical Engineering Professor Leslie Smith, and postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students.

Professor Jim Callen has won Fusion Power Associates' distinguished career award. The nonprofit fusion research and educational foundation presents the award to those who have made significant, lifelong contributions to fusion development.

Professor Ray Fonck has received a three-year, $940,000 grant from the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Science to develop improved techniques to measure small-scale turbulence in high-temperature plasmas. With Associate Scientist George McKee, Fonck and graduate students will develop new instrumentation and conduct experiments on the large-scale DIII-D national tokamak facility at General Atomics, San Diego, California.

Fonck also will co-chair a National Research Council committee that will assess the United States' plans for participation in a burning plasma experiment for fusion energy development. The committee will evaluate the technical and policy merits of proposals for involvement from the U.S. Department of Energy and fusion community and make recommendations to DOE and Congress about how to proceed.

Assistant Professor Rob Carpick is leading a group that has been awarded a three-year, $525,000 grant from the Department of Energy's Basic Energy Sciences Program to study fundamental nanometer-scale mechanisms of friction in micromachines, which often are critically limited by friction-related failures.

Carpick will work with co-PI Professor Mike Plesha, a postdoctoral researcher, a graduate student, and collaborators at Sandia National Labs and Argonne National Lab to measure, model and ultimately predict and control friction in micromachines.

President George W. Bush has asked Professor Mike Corradini to chair the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. An independent agency of the U.S. government, the board provides independent scientific and technical oversight of the U.S. Department of Energy's program for managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel from civilian nuclear power plants. Corradini will serve a four-year term on the 11-member board.

Assistant Professor Wendy Crone earned a best-paper award for her paper, "Using an Advanced Mechanics of Materials Design Project to Enhance Learning in an Introductory Mechanics of Materials Class," during the annual conference of the American Society of Engineering Education, held in Montreal in June.

Professor Rod Lakes, Professor Walt Drugan, Assistant Professor Rob Carpick and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Reid Cooper have begun a four-year, $800,000 National Science Foundation project to study novel extreme composite materials due to constituents with negative stiffness. The group hopes its research will help develop new classes of materials with extreme properties — even materials stiffer than diamond.

The Nuclear Reactor Laboratory is sharing a $10 million Department of Energy grant, which encourages participating universities to make new investments in their research-reactor and nuclear-engineering programs while establishing strategic partnerships with national laboratories and industry. UW-Madison, Penn State University, Purdue University and the University of Illinois have received funds for matching grants, reactor upgrades, reactor sharing and undergraduate scholarships.

Assistant Professor Carl Sovinec received $415,000 over three years from the U.S. Department of Energy Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Development Program. With his funding, Sovinec will use parallel computation to study nonlinear plasma behavior that alters magnetic topology in three different fusion experiments.

Senior Scientist Kumar Sridharan and Professor Mike Corradini have received a two-year, $616,000 grant from the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (NERI) to investigate approaches to incorporating integral fuel-burnable, absorbing elements in fuel-cladding material rather than the current practice of incorporating these elements into fuel pellets. The two will collaborate with Westinghouse Corporation, Pittsburgh, and Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque.

Assistant Professor Paul Wilson, Reactor Director Bob Agasie and Associate Scientist Mark Anderson have received a three-year, $331,593 NERI grant for their project, "Neutron and Beta/Gamma Radiolysis of Supercritical Water." Working with project leaders from Argonne National Lab, the team hopes to define optimal chemical conditions for a longer service-life for supercritical water reactor component piping.

The Fusion Technology Institute has received a $50,000 grant from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to participate in the Human Outer Planet Exploration study of the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts project. Senior Scientist John F. Santarius will lead the effort.