Ongoing Research at the University of San Diego 2014 - Present
Numerical Modeling of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Uncertaiunty Quantification
Channel Flow Modeling for Solar Panel Applications
Tilt Tube
Parameter Studies
Research at Sandia National Laboratories
2004 - 2014
SPENT FUEL DRY STORAGE AND TRANSPORTATION
In 2004, I went to work for the Department of Energy at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) where I worked in nuclear fuel cycle technologies for the Transportation Safety and Security Department. I conducted numerical and experimental thermal studies of transportation packages using PATRAN, FLUENT, and other codes developed by SNL.
FIRE MODELING
My team at SNL developed CAFE, a program funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) to model all relevant fire physics for predicting the thermal response of massive objects engulfed in large fires. CAFE provides realistic fire thermal boundary conditions for use in the design of radioactive material packages and in risk-based transportation studies. This code is used today by SNL for various applications of fire dynamic modeling. The code is discussed in SAND 2005-1469 report.
STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE PROJECT
I performed research related to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) project at Sandia. SPR is the world's largest supply of emergency oil stored in underground salt caverns. Small-scale laboratory experiments simulating the injection of fluids into SPR cavern basins were performed at SNL. I performed the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis using the software FLUENT to simulate these experiments and predict fluid mixing in the SPR project. It became part of the SAND 2006-5418 report.
MELCOR
I worked for three years at the Reactor Modeling and Analysis department at Sandia where I was a code developer for MELCOR, a fully integrated computer code to model the progression of severe accidents in nuclear power plants. I traveled to Russia and France to participate in international efforts aimed at modernizing the code. MELCOR is the only code of its nature that models nuclear power plant crises and was most recently used to analyze the Fukushima nuclear accident. It is the primary code to simulate accidents for the nuclear power industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I was promoted to a Principal Member of the Technical Staff for successfully modernizing the MELCOR code.
Research at UCSD
2000 - 2003
PhD Thesis
I received the Powell Graduate Fellowship while working on my PhD thesis at UCSD with Dr. David Miller. My thesis consisted of experimental and numerical studies of shock waves in compressible flow. This work was a major contribution to computational fluid dynamics, and several papers based on my thesis were published in AICHE. For my thesis, I developed a computer code to calculate the two-dimensional axisymmetric expansion of a supersonic free-jet impacting a flat plate using a time-dependent finite difference method.