Congratulations to NC State Nuclear Engineering student, Grayson Gall, on placing 2nd in the NEUP Innovations in Nuclear R&D Student Open Competition.
His work investigates the “Measurement of a radial flow profile with eddy current flow meters and deep neural networks”.
Eddy Current Flow Meters (ECFMs) measure flow in conductive fluids. ECFMs are well suited for applications in nuclear reactors. They provide external measurements of flow in fluids that are often difficult to measure. Traditionally, ECFMs operate at a single frequency limiting measurements to average fluid velocities, blockages, and/or voids. We measured fluid velocity profiles by making several ECFM sensitivity measurements at a range of frequencies allowing us to probe the fluid velocity at various radial locations. The relationship between ECFM measurements and velocity profiles requires solving an inverse problem, for which traditional methods are ill-suited. However, using electromagnetic simulations to train a Deep Neural Network, we created a relationship between ECFM measurements and fluid velocity profiles. Using ECFM measurements, our model agrees well with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations while remaining stable. This technique can potentially improve flow monitoring for safe and optimized operation of conductive fluid loops, and/or validating CFD models.
Grayson completed his Bachelor of Science (BS) in nuclear engineering with minors in computer programming and music studies at NC State University. This fall 2023 he starts his doctoral studies in nuclear engineering, also at NC State University. His research will be in the area of simulation of plasmas. He is interested in exploring the use of GPUs in building new programs to do so. His advisers will be Drs. Amanda Leitz and Steven Shannon. Currently, his summer internship is at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program. Grayson is working with Dr. Elijah Martin in the Advanced Tokamak Physics Group; working to develop a method to measure the rate of Velocity Changing Collisions in plasma using Doppler Free Saturation Spectroscopy.