NE Doctoral Candidate Receives Award for Nuclear Engineering Software

NE Doctoral Candidate Receives Award for Nuclear Engineering Software

September 6th, 2018

Campus doctoral candidate in nuclear engineering April Novak placed first in the advanced reactor systems category at the annual Innovations in Nuclear Technology R&D Awards in April.

Novak’s paper, “Pronghorn: A Porous Media Thermal-Hydraulics Core Simulator and its Validation with SANA experiments,” was presented at the International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants in April, according to a press release.

“I’m grateful to be able to share what I’m working on and get more people involved in the field of nuclear engineering as a whole or in the design of pebble-reactors,” Novak said.

The paper focused on pebble-bed reactors, which differ from conventional nuclear reactors. Most reactors use long and skinny reactor cores with uranium-oxide as fuel, according to Novak. Pebble-bed reactors, on the other hand, use tennis ball-sized pebbles that consist of uranium kernels, surrounded by layers of silicon carbide and pyrolytic carbon, in a mixture of graphite.

To read more about April’s accomplishment, please go to: http://www.dailycal.org/2018/09/03/campus-graduate-student-receives-awar…

Congratulations, April!