Dr. Kevin Clarno
Distinguished R&D Staff; Group Leader, Reactor Physics
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract

This seminar will provide an overview the physics codes and their integration in the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) suite of codes developed by the Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light-water reactors (CASL).  As nuclear reactors are designed to be operationally stable, during normal operation the physics are loosely-coupled, which allows for a wide variety of potential algorithms for coupling.  As the codes and fidelity for each physics increases in rigor, the optimal computational domain decomposition and performance assessment changes.  The coupling algorithm research will be discussed from two different stages of development and the application of these algorithms will be demonstrated for a variety of challenges faced by the commercial nuclear industry. Additional discussion will include multiple approaches for addressing the multiscale challenge in modeling CRUD deposition.

Biography

Dr. Kevin T. Clarno has been employed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) since 2004, and is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, as a Joint Faculty in the Nuclear Engineering Department. Dr. Clarno recently served as the lead of the Modernization Team of the SCALE nuclear analysis code suite, which is transforming a legacy nuclear analysis software package with thousands of users throughout the world to enable advanced algorithms on modern computing platforms.