Dr. April Novak
Assistant Professor
Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Multiphysics interactions between radiation transport and thermal-fluids play an important role in fission reactor design and safety analysis. This talk will cover the historical challenges, and recent developments, in high-fidelity multiphysics couplings between Monte Carlo radiation transport and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools using Cardinal. Cardinal is an open-source multiphysics integration of the OpenMC Monte Carlo code and the NekRS spectral element CFD code with the MOOSE finite element framework that enables first-of-a-kind multiphysics simulation by leveraging scalable solvers, advancements in GPU computing, and innovative coupling algorithms. Applications to high temperature gas reactors and molten salt reactors will be used to showcase some recent research in this area. Finally, the talk will conclude with discussion on some future directions and current needs in the high-fidelity multiphysics space.

Biography

April Novak 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. Dr. Novak 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 from 2020-2023, 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 during her PhD was the lead developer of the Pronghorn porous media MOOSE-based application. She has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (2020).

Thursday, February 8. 2024
4:00 pm seminar

zoom link upon request