Thermal Hydraulics at NRC, ACRS and Elsewhere

Stephen M. Bajorek has been with the NRC as Senior Technical Advisor for Thermal-Hydraulics approximately ten years, where he is involved in development of the TRACE code, advanced reactor analysis, and the NRC's thermal-hydraulic test programs. Prior to joining the staff he was a member of the faculty at Kansas State University in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. He has 15 years of industrial experience at Westinghouse Electric Corp., where he was involved with the AP600 Design Certification, thermal-hydraulic code development and licensing of the Westinghouse Best Estimate LOCA methodology. Dr. Bajorek received his Ph. D. from Michigan State University, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Sanjoy Banerjee is Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the Energy Institute at the City University of New York and publishes extensively on nuclear thermalhydraulics. Previously he was Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Member of the U.S. NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, ACRS. Earlier in Canada, he occupied the positions of Westinghouse Professor of Engineering Physics at McMaster University and of Acting Director of Applied Science in the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment. He was a founding member of the Canadian Advisory Committee on Nuclear Safety. He has received the ASME Melville Medal, the IChemE (UK) Danckwerts Lecturership, the AIChE Kern Award, and the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award and ANS Technical Achievement Award in Thermal-hydraulics. Fellow of ANS.

Sama Bilbao y León is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of Nuclear Engineering Programs at Virginia Commonwealth University. While at Dominion Generation, she led the development and licensing of new methodologies in core thermal-hydraulics and nuclear safety analysis in support of Dominion's nuclear power stations. As Technical Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Water Cooled Reactors Technology Development Unit, she was in charge of all IAEA activities in support of the development and near term deployment of advanced water cooled reactors and their associated fuels.

Christopher Boyd is a senior level advisor for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) within the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). He carried out the program to bring CFD tools “in-house” for the NRC during the 1990s and has spent the past 15 years utilizing these tools for nuclear safety analyses. Previously, he spent 9 years working on instrumentation development and optimization for high-speed wind tunnel testing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland in the area of thermal-fluids behavior.

Michael L. Corradini is Chair and Wisconsin Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a member of the U.S. NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS), member of NRC safety review panels and of the DoE Generation IV Roadmap Project. He has published widely in areas related to vapour explosion and severe accident phenomena, jet spray dynamics and transport phenomena in multiphase systems. Member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of ANS.

Thomas Downar received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1984 and from 1984-2006 was a Professor in the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. After a year as a Professor at University of California-Berkeley, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan where he is currently a Professor and Graduate Chair in the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department. Professor Downar is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. The primary focus of his research is nuclear reactor physics and multiphysics computational methods in support of the U.S. NRC, the U.S. DoE, EPRI and several international agencies. He is the author of the U.S. NRC core neutronics simulator PARCS and has contributed to the development of the thermal-hydraulics codes TRACE and RELAP5. The coupled neutronics and thermal-hydraulics codes TRACE/PARCS and RELAP5/PARCS are used worldwide to perform the safety analysis of most every type of power reactor currently operating in the world.

Geoffrey F. Hewitt is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College, London. Founder of the Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Service (HTFS) at the Harwell Laboratory. He has authored and edited many books and published over 500 papers and reports. Former Editor of Multiphase Science and Technology and former Executive Editor of the Heat Exchanger Design Handbook. Recipient of the AIChE Donald Q. Kern, the ASME Max Jacob awards, the Nusselt Reynolds Prize, the Luikov Medal, the IChemE Council and Armstrong medals, the Senior Multiphase Flow Award and the Global Energy Prize. He has Honorary Doctorates from Louvain, UMIST and Heriot Watt Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering.

George Yadigaroglu is Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering, ETH-Zurich and President and co-founder of ASCOMP, an ETH spin-off company specializing in CMFD simulations. Was also Head of the Thermal-Hydraulics Laboratory at the Paul Scherrer Institute. Previously Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California-Berkeley. Active in research and consulting and a member of several international high-level committees dealing with nuclear safety issues. ANS Technical Achievement Award. ANS and ASME Fellow. Former Associate Editor of the International Journal of Multiphase Flow.

Ghani Zigh is a Senior Technical Advisor in the U.S. NRC in the Office of Research, and is a registered PE (Professional Engineer) in the state of New York. He has been a USNRC staff member since August 2002, and involved in dry cask applications, BWR and PWR Zircaloy Fire (accident analysis), APWR advanced accumulators, fire analysis, and ultrasonic flow meters. Prior to the NRC, he worked at Parsons Brinkerhoff (PB) in Manhattan as an international consultant using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to model fire and emergency ventilation for tunnels and train stations as well as the effects of thermal pollution of power plants on oceans and rivers. He was also an adjunct professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey where he taught undergraduate and graduate classes in Mechanical Engineering.