FACULTY / STAFF NEWS
Department researchers recently received three Nuclear Engineering Research Initiative Awards from the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology. With $900,000 over three years, Assistant Professor Todd Allen’s (pictured) group will study candidate materials for the
supercritical water-cooled reactor. With $650,000 over three years, a group under
Senior Scientist Kumar Sridharan and
Associate Scientist Mark Anderson will study the materials corrosion and heat-transfer
phenomena of a molten salt heat-transport loop.
With $300,000 over three years, Assistant Professor Paul Wilson’s group will study the adoption of advanced fuel cycle technology under a single repository policy.
Associate Scientist Mark Anderson received the American Nuclear
Society’s (ANS) 2005 Young Member Engineering Achievement Award on June 7 at the society’s annual meeting in San Diego. The award recognizes outstanding achievements by ANS members under 40 years old in effectively applying engineering knowledge, resulting in an engineering concept, design, method of analysis or product used in a nuclear power research and development or commercial application. Anderson is the award’s 25th recipient.
The Air Force Office of Scientific
Research has awarded Assistant Professor Rob Carpick a three-
year, $480,000 grant to investigate the atomic-scale origins of wear in nanostructured diamond and diamond-like carbon films. Carpick will collaborate with campus colleagues and those at Argonne and Sandia National Labs. Also, Sandia National Labs awarded Carpick a one-year, $18,000 grant to study the frictional properties of self-assembled monolayers that Sandia uses to protect and lubricate silicon micromachines.
With $3 million, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate has funded a 15-month collaboration led by Professor Greg Moses and Boston University Professor Roscoe Giles. The collaboration, “Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure,” or EPIC, includes K-12 teachers, university researchers, leaders of organizations focused on diversity, and tool builders from across the country. They will develop virtual institutes, workshops, summer programs, internships, and other activities designed to cross-breed their best practices, to engage a broader and more diverse community in cyberinfrastructure, and to create sustaining programs that will have an effect for years to come.
Senior Scientist Kumar Sridharan and Assistant Professor Todd Allen have received a three-year, $296,000 Department of Energy Nuclear Engineering Education Research (NEER) award to study surface alloying and cold-spraying of the neutron-absorbing material, boron, onto fuel-containment-tube materials in nuclear reactors.
They will collaborate with colleagues at
Sandia National Laboratories, Idaho National Laboratory, and Westinghouse Corporation.
The Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences has awarded Assistant Professor Dennis Whyte a three-year, $450,000 grant to study disruption mitigation in burning plasma experiments. Whyte’s project will build on successful experiments in which high-pressure gas injection into the disrupting plasma mitigates damaging effects on the materials. Collaborating on experiments and computer simulations with teams from General Atomics, MIT, and the European Union fusion experiment JET, Whyte hopes to design viable disruption-mitigation scenarios for ITER, a $5 billion burning plasma experiment proposed for a site in Japan or Europe.
