September 11
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
Thursday, September 11
12:00 – 1:00pm
106 Engineering Research Building
Please contact office@neep.wisc.edu for assistance with remote participation.
Short-cutting critical searches with the zeta-eigenvalue equation
Criticality searches, such as finding the boron concentration or control rod position that makes a reactor critical, are usually performed through repeated k-eigenvalue calculations. This presentation will introduce a new approach based on the zeta-eigenvalue, a scaling parameter applied to material densities or system dimensions in the neutron transport equation. At convergence, zeta directly yields the critical density or dimension. This talk will go through the theory, its implementation in the SCONE Monte Carlo code, and numerical results relevant to reactor physics and criticality safety.
Valeria Raffuzzi
Valeria Raffuzzi is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. She holds a BSc in Energy Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, an MSc in Nuclear Engineering from ETH Zurich, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on developing and analysing Monte Carlo methods for neutron transport, and on nuclear data evaluation and validation.
Paul Cosgrove
Paul is an assistant teaching professor and research fellow at the University of Cambridge. After graduating from Queen’s, Belfast in chemical engineering (2014), he moved to Cambridge where obtained his MPhil in Nuclear Energy (2016) and PhD in engineering (2020). Paul’s research concerns computational reactor physics, particularly stochastic transport and understanding the behaviour of different algorithms.