Dr. Vivek M. Rao
R&D Associate II, Thermal Hydraulics Group
Advanced Reactor Engineering and Development Section
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract

Equipment and process operations in power generation and chemicals manufacturing are commonly challenged by multi-scale interactions involving thermochemical and thermophysical transformations of fluids, and fluid-structure interactions. By broadly resolving the scales of flow, heat transfer, phase change, and chemical transformations, a basic understanding of governing phenomena can be computationally simulated using finite-volume/element approximations. This talk discusses the use of commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools on USDOE’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources to expedite, enhance, and elucidate the understanding of a variety of  multi-physics interactions in (i) nuclear processes (fission, fusion) (ii) reacting flows (iii) waste heat recovery, and (iv) advanced heat exchanger topologies.

Biography

Vivek joined the Advanced Reactor Engineering Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a post-doctoral research associate in 2018. Since then, Vivek has worked with programs sponsored by the USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy such as ARPA-e and LLNL-HPC4 Energy Innovation, while supporting design, modeling, and simulation activities at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center (BTRIC), and the Materials Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX), among other projects in applied CFD at ORNL. Vivek graduated with doctoral and master’s degrees (2018, 2012) in chemical engineering from the Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Thursday, October 28. 2021
4:00 pm seminar