PhD Candidate
2014-Present

Research Area
Investigation of Heat Transfer in Extreme Environments with Associated Density Variations

My research is focused on characterizing the heat transfer at a high pressure, high temperature environment with thermodynamic property variations. The high pressure, high temperature environment is due to fluid above the critical point where property variations are significant. More specifically I am interested in the influence of property variations of supercritical water (critical point : T = 647K, P = 22.082 MPa) on heat transfer. My work thus far has focused on improving the efficiency, while maintaining the safety, of a Supercritical Water Reactor (SCWR) by characterizing and analyzing the fluid dynamics and heat transfer phenomena of the working fluid. Supercritical water exhibits large property changes not easily captured by commercial codes. My goal is to demonstrate that the fully implicit Reconstructed Discontinuous Galerkin (rDG) method, developed in code at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is capable of capturing the nonlinear properties to accurately demonstrate the influence of supercritical thermodyanmics on heat transfer.

This work is performed in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE) through LLNL. Program support was also funded by the Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy through the Integrated University Program (IUP) or Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). [2015 – 2018]