Dr. Dillon Shaver
Principal Nuclear Engineer
Nuclear Science and Engineering Division
Argonne National Laboratory

Abstract

As a key part of the U. S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program (NEAMS), the next generation of tools for nuclear reactor design are being developed. Nek5000 is the NEAMS tool for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Nek5000 is an open-source spectral element based CFD solver capable of simulating incompressible and weakly compressible (low Mach number) flows in complex geometries. It has demonstrated impressive scaling on leadership class computational facilities, enabling first-of-their-kind full-nuclear-reactor-core simulations. This talk will discuss the background of Nek5000 and describe some of the past, ongoing, and potential future work being done with Nek5000 and its GPU-accelerated version, NekRS, in NEAMS and other closely related DOE programs – including projects in light water reactors, liquid metal reactors, molten salt reactor applications, and multiphase flows.

Biography

Dr. Dillon Shaver is a Principal Nuclear Engineer in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He is the development lead for Nek5000 in the US DOE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Program and has significant experience with model development, implementation, and validation in Nek5000. He currently serves as the assistant technical program committee chair for the Thermal Hydraulics Division of the American Nuclear Society. In 2020, he won the Lewis F. Moody Award from the Fluids Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He holds a PhD in nuclear engineering and science obtained from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2014.