NE offers inaugural industry-sponsored senior design projects

NE offers inaugural industry-sponsored senior design projects

Obtaining real-world experience outside the classroom is just one factor as to what establishes a well-rounded education and this fall, seniors in the School of Nuclear Engineering will receive exactly that in the inaugural industry-sponsored senior design class. After months of planning, and over 21 different project proposals from a variety of industry leaders, 5 projects were selected.

 

UPDATE: Thank you to our sponsors!

Please see our gallery with photos of the teams with their posters and giving their technical presentations.

Project sponsors include the following: 

Exelon

Project Title: Boiling Water Reactor Fuel Foreign Material Barrier

The goal of this project is to design a barrier that may be placed at the top of a fuel bundle to eliminate the possibility that foreign material could enter from the top of a bundle. This debris filter must not significantly
impact the performance of the bundle.


Niowave Inc.

Project Title: System Design of a 250 kW Subcritical Reactor for Medical Radioisotope Production

The goal of this project is to develop a neutronics model of the subcritical system, determine optimal fuel dimensions (enrichment, size, pitch, and cladding) for isotope production, and iterate results as needed to produce the final design.


RGA Labs Inc.

Project Title: SMR - Electric Storage Hybrid (SMRE)

The objectives of the project would be to produce a suitable design concept that meets all of the basic requirements for a next-generation SMR electric generation unit (SMRE) that can be quickly and easily deployed both on established grids, as well as in remote, less developed, or degraded regions (e.g. Puerto Rico)


U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Project Title: The Impact of Weather on Radiological Dose Projections

The design team will evaluate the sensitivity of weather on the dose projections for an assumed small modular reactor source term using the current version of the NRC’s Radiological Assessment System for Consequence Analysis (RASCAL) code. They will use RASCAL to quantify the impact that various weather conditions (e.g. - wind speed, atmospheric stability, precipitation, wind persistence) have on the dose projections over a 96-hour period from the time of release.


Westinghouse

Project Title: CFD analysis of heat exchanger rupture in a Lead Fast Reactor

The proposed team project will provide useful insights to be used in support of the design of the Westinghouse LFR. The student team will use a CFD code, such as STAR-CCM+ (preferred), CFX or Fluent, to analyze the dynamics and perform sensitivities for a hypothetical heat exchanger rupture occurring in an LFR. To this end, the student team will build a simplified domain representative of the plant’s primary system, reproducing only the plant characteristics that are relevant to the problem under consideration.