Graduate programs and research facilities are available in thermal-hydraulics, neutronics, computational methods, advanced controls with applications of artificial intelligence, materials, radiation monitoring and effects, fuel management, and radioactive waste management. Application areas include the following:

Reactor Safety Research

Severe accident analysis modeling; advanced thermal-hydraulic computer code development, including rod bundle subchannel analysis, three-dimensional neutron kinetics; applications to BWR and PWR loss of coolant and transient analysis.

Reactor Core Analysis

Application of optimization techniques and expert systems to fuel management; design of low-leakage, long-life cores; use of statistical core analysis to increase thermal margin; coupled 3D kinetics and thermal hydraulics analysis methods.

Particle Transport Methods and Application

Development, implementation, and analysis of advanced methods and solution techniques for particle transport problems; Arbitrarily High Order Transport methods for tetrahedral meshes; multiprocessing algorithms and parallel performance modeling for particle transport methods; detailed modeling of nuclear systems via the deterministic transport code package DOORS (DORT and TORT codes).

Advanced Control

Use of optimal, adaptive and robust control for reactor systems. Development of fuzzy logic and neural network control, and application of learning automata to select alternative control algorithms; real-time diagnostics based on AI techniques; human factors in control room design; experimental testing using the TRIGA reactor and the Intelligent Distributed Controls Laboratory.

Radiation Monitoring and Instrumentation

Development of new techniques to measure beta emitting radionuclides in reactor effluent; wide-range instrument development for real-time beta dose measurement; multi-energy gamma backscatter device to measure pipe wall thickness in insulated pipes.

Materials Research

Experimental and theoretical aspects of the effects of radiation on metals; stress-corrosion cracking of Ni-based alloys, deformation mechanisms of Zircaloy; study of mechanical properties and failure mechanism of irradiated borated steels; use of nuclear probes to characterize electronic materials, including epitaxial growth of gallium arsenide.

Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics Research

Single- and two-phase heat transfer in rod bundles are being studied experimentally and analytically using state-of-the-art subchannel analysis methods for PWRs and BWRs. A full-length, 49-rod bundle heat transfer facility is being built and a low pressure experimental simulation of a BWR passive plant is operational.