Nuclear Engineering Faculty Awarded $1.5 Million in Nuclear Energy University Programs Funding

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The Department of Energy (DOE) has notified two Nuclear Engineering Program (NEP) faculty within the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering that it will award three grants worth a combined $1.5 million to fund their research through the Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) initiative.

Professor Tunc Aldemir is the Principal Investigator (PI) for two of the Ohio State projects awarded DOE funding.  His project titled, “Pathway Aggregation (Clustering) in the Risk Assessment of Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection of Nuclear Energy Systems” supports the NEUP’s Mission Supporting Transformative Research initiative and will receive $534, 471 in funding across two years. Collaborators on the project include Meng Yue and Lap-Yan Cheng of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Ohio State faculty members Umit Catalyurek, Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Alper Yilmaz, Department Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science.

Aldemir’s other project titled, “Methodology Development for Passive Component Reliability Modeling in a Multi-Physics Simulation Environment” supports NEUP’s Reactor Concepts Research Development and Demonstration initiative and will be funded for $533,457 over two-years. Collaborators include Richard Denning, NEP, Umit Catalyurek, Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Stephen Unwin of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Also receiving DOE funding is Assistant Professor Lei (Raymond) Cao, NEP, for the project titled, “A High Temperature-tolerant and Radiation-resistant In-core Neutron Sensor for Advanced Reactors.” His co-PI is Professor Emeritus Don Miller, NEP. Their project is also grouped in the NEUP’s Mission Supporting Transformative Research initiative and will be funded across three years for $455,629.

Professor Aldemir, who is also the department’s nuclear engineering graduate committee chair, commented on the awards, “The NEUP awards are highly competitive.  The success rate for this round was seven percent. Our faculty has done well with NEUP grants since the inception of NEUP in 2009.  Our previous department awardees were Thomas Blue in 2009 and Xiaodong Sun in 2009 and 2010. Wolfgang Windl of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering was also awarded a grant in 2010.  Including the current awards, the total amount of NEUP funding received by Ohio State faculty since 2009 is $4.5 million.”

The Ohio State projects represent three of 51 NEUP projects sharing this year’s $39 million investment in cutting-edge nuclear energy-related research and development by the DOE. Finding new methods of reducing carbon pollution, creating clean energy jobs and strengthening America’s nuclear energy industry is the aim of the project funding.

 

For further details about 2011 NEUP R&D award abstracts, visit https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt/community/neup_home/600/2011…


For more information about NEUP, visit neup.gov

For more information about the Department of Energy, visit energy.gov
 
Category: Faculty