Multiscale Modeling and Uncertainty Quantification for Nuclear Fuel Performance
Workshop Information
The Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy is undertaking a concerted effort to accelerate the time-consuming and expensive process of developing new types of nuclear fuel that increase sustainability. The acceleration depends heavily on the development of improved mathematical and statistical models of potential fuel types that provide robust reliability in behavior predictions. Existing fuel performance models are most semi-empirical descriptions calibrated by the limited observational data, which leads to serious limitations in terms of predicting the behavior of new types of fuel. Moreover, there are significant microstructural and compositional changes in fuels in the extreme environment of a reactor, which makes the modeling all the more difficult. Recently, a team of three universities (Colorado State, Wyoming, and Purdue) and one laboratory (Idaho National Laborator) were awarded a Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) grant in this area. The team will address the challenges of multiscale modeling of nuclear fuel performance on both the level of creating new modeling paradigms and carrying out systematic uncertainty quantification for multiscale models.
On Wednesday morning, 9:00-12:00, Jan. 25, members of the team will survey current practices, challenges, and ongoing research pertaining to nuclear fuel performance. On Thursday morning, 9:00-11:00, Jan. 26, an expert on nuclear fuel models, Prof. Anter El-Azab of Purdue, will present a detailed description of multiscale nuclear fuel models in the SAMSI Applied UQ Seminar.
Speakers and active participants include Anter El-Azab (Purdue University), Donald Estep (Colorado State University), William Newton (Colorado State University), Michael Pernice (Idaho National Lab), Peter Polyakov (University of Wyoming), Simon Taverner (Colorado State University), Dongbin Xiu (Purdue University)
Schedule
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
at SAMSI, Room 104
| 9:00-9:20 a.m. | Anter El-Azab, Purdue University Modeling thermal transport in nuclear fuels |
| 9:20-9:40 | Peter Polyakov, University of Wyoming Cahn-Hilliard equations, theory and computation |
| 9:40-10:00 | Yushu Yang, SAMSI Decoupling coupled stochastic systems |
| 10:00-10:20 | William Newton, Colorado State University Progress on a mathematical framework for coupling stochastic models |
| 10:20-10:40 | Don Estep, Colorado State University Using set-valued inverse solutions in stochastic inverse problems for parameter determination |
| 10:40-11:00 | Break |
| 11:00-12:00 | Michael Pernice, Idaho National Lab Multiscale modeling and UQ for nuclear fuel performance: project context |
Thursday, January 26, 2012
at SAMSI, Room 150
| 9:00-11:00 a.m. | Anter El-Azab, Purdue University On the theory of radiation effects in nuclear fuel |