Award Data

The use of advanced ceramic materials, such as silicon carbide, for light water reactor fuel cladding is being investigated, in part due to the increased safety margin afforded by this technology over conventional zircaloy metallic claddings. In light of the Fukushima events, safety concerns have come to the forefront of public scrutiny of commercial nuclear generated power and spurred activity in ...

Explosive Electron Emission (EEE) is typical to cathodic arcs. The physics of multi-phase phenomena associated with self-sustained formation of explosive emission centers (ectons) is not fully understood. This SBIR project will conduct experimental, theoretical, and computational studies of phase transitions at electrode surfaces, formation of plasma jets, and gas dynamics in cathodic sparks and a ...

Over the past decade, the use of multiphysics simulation – combining tools covering multiple physics disciplines together to generate advanced predictive codes – has surged as available computational power has grown. Many of these tools use “meshes” or “grids” to discretize their problem domains, and often, data must be transfered from one grid to another many times during a simulation ...

Cost and time associated with material waste, quality control, inspection, and manufacturing of nuclear fuel assembly components can detrimental to nuclear plant design and development. Specifically, spacer grids and nozzles are prime component examples that inherently carry these issues due to their complex geometries. The design engineer must always weigh the manufacturing practices against the ...

In the United States, desalination and membrane technologies are used to augment municipal water supply, produce high-quality industrial water supplies, and reclaim contaminated supplies. Since the electricity expenses represent one-third to one-half of the operating cost of many desalination technologies, the energy intensity raises concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and the usefulness of th ...

Tungsten and its alloys are candidates for plasma facing component (PFC) armor due to their low sputtering rate, high melting point, high thermal conductivity, high strength at elevated temperatures, and low tritium inventory. Although copper alloys have been selected for the heat sinks for ITER, a working fusion reactor will require the use of higher strength, low activation materials. For exampl ...

In this program, QuesTek Innovations LLC, a leader in the field of computational materials design, proposes to develop a robust creep modeling toolkit that expands its computational Materials by Design® technology, in order to predict the long term creep performance of materials for base alloys and weldments in fossil energy systems under wide thermal and mechanical conditions. Precipitation mode ...

A recent report of the 25-member Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) recommends funding cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments under all budget scenarios, specifically, the next-generation ground-based CMB experimental program whose aim is to provide definitive measurements of the early universe. For this program, large focal plane arrays with ~100,000 detectors and associate ...

Future particle physics experiments at the high-energy frontier such as the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, (HL-LHC), International Linear Collider (ILC), or Multi-TeV Muon Collider, will all require silicon detectors capable of reconstructing charged particle trajectories with high accuracy in the presence of extremely high luminosity (1035/cm2/sec in the case of the HL-LHC). The large amo ...

Improvements and advances are needed in the technical area of vision system technologies for high-radiation environments, specifically in the operation and remote handling of equipment in nuclear reactor inspection applications. Currently, visual inspection systems for Nuclear Energy applications are extremely limited. Commercially available vision systems are not radiation- tolerant at the level ...