After a 35-year hiatus, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is executing a series of experiments looking at the thermostructural response of materials at the Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR). The purpose of these experiments is to help validate a radiation transport code and a finite element structural code used at the laboratory. The radiation transport was modeled using the Monte Carlo radiation transport code, Mercury. The energy deposition from the Mercury simulation was then input into the finite element code, Diablo, to model the thermal diffusion and structural response. Preliminary results from these simulations and experiments will be presented.
Perry Chodash is a design physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He completed his doctoral research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he set a limit on the nuclear excitation by electronic transition rate in U-235. His current research is in the areas of radiation transport and modeling the thermostructural response of materials due to intense radiation pulses.
