An important improvement in the area of reactor core neutronic modeling is the development and use of the methods based on "quasi-diffusion" (QD) low-order equations. This family of methods takes into account the transport exactly using "functionals" computed by solving transport equations, and is amenable to solution with a variety...
We investigate several aspects of the numerical solution of the radiative transfer
equation in the context of coal combustion: the parallel efficiency of two commonly used
opacity models, the sensitivity of turbulent radiation interaction (TRI) effects
to the presence of coal particulate, and an improvement of the order of temporal...
The most widely used and versatile medical radioisotope today is technetium-99m. Roughly 30 million people depend on this radioisotope for diagnostic procedures each year, and this demand is expected to grow. Although there are numerous ways of procuring this isotope, the most common and most practical, for reasons to be...
Antineutrino detectors could provide a valuable addition to current safeguards
regimes. Antineutrinos are an attractive emission to monitor due to their low
interaction cross-section that prevents them from being shielded and the dependence
of their spectrum on the power level and isotopic content of a reactor core. While
there are...
Human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (CAMP/LL-37) is a cationic antimicrobial peptide that is widely expressed by myeloid and epithelial cells at the human-environment interface. It possesses broad spectrum antimicrobial capacity against bacteria, fungi and viruses. In addition to its direct antimicrobial activity, CAMP/LL-37 also attracts and recruits monocytes, neutrophils and other...
In this dissertation, we derive and implement a new transport-diffusion hybrid algorithm for solving thermal radiative transfer (TRT) problems. Using the method of nonlinear elimination (NLEM), the TRT system of equations can be written in terms of a transport equation with the absence of scattering and a diffusion equation. The...
The implementation of advanced hybrid (Monte Carlo/Deterministic) transport methods for realistic test problems has been a challenge due to the overhead efforts associated with interfacing a solution generated by a deterministic solver with a Monte Carlo based radiation transport code. In this work, with the help of Transpire, Inc., a...
Circulating fuel reactor (CFR) kinetics are characterized by delayed neutron precursor (DNP) drift in addition to the neutronic and thermal hydraulic phenomena typical of other reactor types. This environment can be computationally challenging to model, given that the multiphysics phenomena generally have non-linear interdependencies requiring the use of iterative solution...
In this dissertation, we attempt to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" inherent to radiation diffusion kinetics problems by employing a novel reduced order modeling technique known as proper generalized decomposition (PGD). After verifying a proposed PGD algorithm and associated solvers through various tests, we explore its performance for computing reduced-order...
We spatially discretize the Sn transport equation using the high-order (HO) discontinuous finite element method (DFEM) on HO meshes. Previous work provided a proof-of-concept for this spatial discretization method in X-Y geometry. Included in the present work, we derive a spatial discretization for the Sn transport equation in both X-Y...