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Integrated Radiation Transport and Nuclear Fuel Performance for Assembly-Level Simulations

Wednesday, May 16, 2012
10AM – 11AM
POB 6.304

Kevin Taylor Clarno

The ability to predict the behavior of nuclear fuel assemblies, at a continuum-scale, during irradiation in an operating reactor poses many significant challenges. This presentation will focus on the computational challenges associated with the recent integration of the Denovo radiation transport code and with the AMP thermo-mechanics solver for high-fidelity simulation of nominal operation in a Pressurized Water Reactor nuclear fuel assembly along with initial simulation results from large-scale simulations on Jaguar/Titan (Cray XT6) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This is the first step towards analysis of fuel assembly distortion due to a wide variety of multi-physics simulations and part of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs (CASL) and the DOE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) programs.

Bio:
Kevin T. Clarno earned a Ph.D. and M.S. from Texas A&M University, as well as a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Nuclear Engineering. He has been employed in the Reactor and Nuclear Systems Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) since 2004, after serving as a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Fellow at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory from 2002 to 2004. Dr. Clarno is leading a multi-institutional team to develop the AMP Nuclear Fuel Performance code, which includes a flexible scientific computing foundation for high-performance computing architectures, for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. Dr. Clarno has served as the Principal Investigator for several major ORNL Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) and DOE projects, including the development of high-performance computing radiation (Boltzmann) transport codes for nuclear reactor simulation and the integration of the NESTLE core simulator with the SCALE nuclear analysis code system. Dr. Clarno maintains a focus on mentoring the next generation of researchers; he has advised 20 students and post-degree researchers and leads the ORNL Nuclear Science and Technology Interaction Program (NSTIP) in bringing university researchers to provide guest lectures at ORNL. He has served, or is actively serving, on six M.S. or Ph.D. committees at three universities and has co-instructed several courses at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Clarno is actively involved in both nuclear fuel and reactor analysis and the development and improvement in ORNL nuclear analysis software. He has been actively involved in the software development of exploratory coupled-physics solvers, as well as production software in SCALE. He has made contributions in the development and implementation of linear and non-linear methods of accelerating 1-, 2-, and 3-D radiation transport solvers, including CENTRM, NEWT, NEWTRNX, and Denovo. Dr. Clarno has published more than 40 papers in journals, conference proceedings, and technical reports, spanning diverse areas of nuclear science and engineering.

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