Graduate students Colin Josey and Benjamin Lawrence Magolan are recipients of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) fellowships that will support their graduate education in MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and provide internships in national labs.
Josey is among 33 graduate students nationwide who have been awarded a Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) fellowship from the DOE. He is working on the development of new methods to handle Doppler broadening for Monte Carlo methods in the resolved resonance range. Current techniques require large amounts of memory, which is at a premium in planned supercomputers. By implementing the Windowed Multipole formalism in OpenMC, Josey hopes to reduce memory requirements and improve performance in reactors operating at hot full power. Josey works with faculty members Benoit Forget and Kord Smith in NSE.
As an NEUP graduate fellow, Josey will receive $50,000 annually over the next three years, in addition to a summer internship at a national laboratory.
Magolan, a first-year graduate student in NSE, was recently awarded a Rickover Fellowship in Nuclear Engineering. Magolan's research focuses on the implementation of the linear and quadratic k-epsilon turbulence model into Hydra-TH, an advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code being developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This model will better capture the anisotropy of turbulent flows in rod bundle channels. His work consists of programming and implementing the model into the Hydra-TH software, in addition to verifying and validating these contributions via numerous simulations and by comparison to other turbulence models, CFD software, and experimental results. Magolan works with Emilio Baglietto, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering.
The Rickover Fellowship provides 24 months of funding for students enrolled in a full-time master's degree program, and 48 months of funding for those in a doctoral degree program. The fellowship is designed to meet the needs of DOE's Naval Reactors Division for appropriately trained personnel for the maintenance and development of science and engineering technology as it pertains to naval nuclear propulsion.
