Year in Review: Nuclear Thermal Hydraulic Achievements of 2023

Marilyn is a Mechanical System Design Engineer with the Advanced Technologies Division of BWX Technologies. She works on the design, analysis, testing, and prototype development of high-temperature gas micro-reactors and micro-reactor plants. Prior to joining BWXT, she graduated with her Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering from The City College of New York in 2015, Masters in Nuclear Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2018, and PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2021 combining Nuclear and Mechanical Engineering Disciplines. Her research and dissertation work focused on experimental studies of flow induced vibration and vortex shedding phenomena in advanced nuclear heat exchanger designs.

April is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological (NPRE) Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she leads research programs in computational methods for nuclear engineering with emphasis on thermal-hydraulics, Monte Carlo methods, multiphysics, high performance computing, and open source software development. April is the PI for Cardinal, an open-source high-fidelity multiphysics application which is a winner of the 2023 R&D 100 Award. Prior to joining UIUC, she was a Fellow in the Computational Sciences Division at Argonne, where she led and contributed to many modeling and simulation efforts for advanced reactors. She is also an expert on pebble bed reactor thermal-hydraulics, and was the original developer of the Pronghorn porous media MOOSE-based application. She has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (2020).

Xu is an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University. His main research interests include: uncertain quantification, Bayesian inverse problems, model discrepancy analysis, scientific machine learning and deep generative modeling. Xu received his BS in Nuclear Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011 and PhD in Nuclear Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign in 2017. Prior to joining NC State in 2019, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

Kevin is a research consultant at the Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) in The Netherlands. He obtained his BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology, specializing in fundamental and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and heat transfer. He then worked on a PhD at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, in the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, studying the “Effects of Turbulence on Droplet Growth in Clouds”. He has been in his present position since 2016, being part of the Reactor Analysis & operational Support (RAS) team at NRG. His research interests are Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI), being the interaction between the coolant and structural components of a nuclear power plant, Multi-Scale Simulations, which involves the coupling of CFD and System Thermal Hydraulics (STH) codes, and Reactor Pool Modeling of Fast Reactors, studying the thermal hydraulic behavior of the coolant in the full primary system of the reactor.