Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. NERS Colloquia with Kelsa Palomares of Analytical Mechanics Associates (December 3, 2021 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/89536 89536-21664055@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 3, 2021 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Abstract
Fission is a high power density energy source for space applications capable of enabling high power levels for long durations which is desirable for surface power and in-space propulsion methods for crewed missions. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) and nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) are advanced, in-space propulsion technologies capable of higher efficiencies than traditional chemical engines, making them well suited to enable crewed interplanetary missions. In NTP systems, the reactor acts as a heat exchanger and directly heats a hydrogen propellant to provide high thrust (10s – 100s klbf) at high efficiencies, i.e. specific impulse (> 800 s). NEP systems use a reactor to generate electricity to power high-efficiency electric propulsion thrusters which enable nearly a magnitude greater specific impulse (> 2000 s), but at reduced thrust (0.001 – 1 lbf). Because of these attributes, space nuclear propulsion technologies have the capability to reduce trip times on the order of half of that compared to the highest performance chemical systems and there has been renewed interest in the development of these systems for future NASA or defense applications within the U.S. There has been extensive development for both NTP and NEP systems through historic space nuclear propulsion programs, however none of these programs have quite reached the development status desired for implementation of either system in modern missions. Primary hurdles to reactor development have centered around materials development for the extreme operating conditions desired for high-performance space reactors. In this presentation, the state of the art, lessons learned, and remaining knowledge gaps from historic NTP and NEP development programs are summarized. Based on this overview, critical components for each reactor and remaining materials development challenges are identified.

Keywords: nuclear thermal propulsion, nuclear electric propulsion, technology maturation, reactor, testing

Bio
Kelsa Benensky Palomares, Ph.D. is the Nuclear Systems Engineering Lead for the Advanced Projects Group of Analytical Mechanics Associates, Inc. (AMA). Dr. Palomares has a background in the design, testing, and experimental investigation of new and novel concepts for nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) through NTP development programs at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Center for Space Nuclear Research. Activities have included re-design and operational verification of MSFC’s compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) and co-authoring ORNL/LTR-2017/119, “A Preliminary Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Fuel Qualification Plan”, to guide the production, irradiation testing, and verification of NTP fuel elements for the Department of Energy. She has recently participated as the reactor-subsystem lead for an industry nuclear thermal propulsion flight demonstration study commissioned by NASA and led by AMA and served as a peer reviewer for the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine’s report “Space Nuclear Propulsion for Human Mars Exploration”. She currently provides subject matter expertise to ongoing reactor development efforts for NASA’s space nuclear propulsion (SNP) project. Dr. Palomares has received degrees in Mechanical Engineering (B.S.), Nuclear Engineering (B.S.) from the Pennsylvania State University, as well as Materials Science and Engineering (MS) and Nuclear Engineering (Ph.D.) from University of Tennessee.

Advanced Projects Group, Analytical Mechanics Associates, Huntsville, AL, 35806

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 03 Dec 2021 13:19:09 -0500 2021-12-03T16:00:00-05:00 2021-12-03T17:00:00-05:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Workshop / Seminar Colloquia
Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Open House (January 18, 2022 5:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/89354 89354-21662210@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 5:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

The Open House is scheduled from 5-7:30pm on 1/18/22 in 2906 Cooley. First-year and undeclared second year students will have the opportunity to connect with Nuclear Engineering students, faculty, and student orgs. If ready, students will also be allowed to declare their Engineering Physics or Nuclear Engineering major. Free food and swag will be provided!

Students can arrive anytime between 5-6pm. Laboratory tours will begin promptly at 6pm (and will go until 7:30pm).

RSVP Here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScwV-lvZy3mrR0tEsoXDI2R5M-vIBqMgimGH6seQ5i3ynU12Q/viewform

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Reception / Open House Thu, 18 Nov 2021 08:47:09 -0500 2022-01-18T17:00:00-05:00 2022-01-18T19:30:00-05:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Reception / Open House Cooley Building
Not the Science Type (February 11, 2022 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/91826 91826-21683196@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 11, 2022 4:30pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Presented by the University of Michigan Chapter of Women in Nuclear.

Not The Science Type highlights four brilliant minds, showcasing women who break down boundaries within their fields—biology, engineering, science, and technology-based applications. The documentary features NERS alum Ciara Sivels. Join us for a special showing of Not The Science Type in honor of International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Registration Required.

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Film Screening Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:36:18 -0500 2022-02-11T16:30:00-05:00 2022-02-11T17:30:00-05:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Film Screening Not the Science Type
NERS Colloquia Series: Building Inclusive Teams (September 9, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/96984 96984-21793647@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 9, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Research demonstrates a strong correlation between inclusion, diversity, and organizational effectiveness. Inclusive teams enjoy higher productivity, and lower attrition. This shaped Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) commitment to building an empowered workforce that’s inclusive and diverse, where everyone feels they belong.

This discussion will outline efforts to:

—Embed inclusivity into all aspects of organizational operations.
—Engage the workforce in a shared commitment to foster belonging, togetherness, inclusion, and psychological safety.
—Build inclusively diverse teams to enhance mission results.

Speaker Bio:
Toni L. Coleman Carter is the energetic Chief Inclusion and Collaborator Officer who strategically drives an inclusive future for Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She's a change champion who collaborates with Laboratory and community leaders to create environments which empower and engage others to achieve a competitive advantage, further leveraging talent platforms to enhance employee capabilities, build next generation leaders, and drive bottom-line results. She also partners as a consultant to create, develop, and oversee inclusion and diversity initiatives, while increasing inclusion awareness and providing governance for INL’s inclusion leadership councils (ERGs).

Carter has nine years of combined governmental experience, which includes her time as the deputy mayor for the Village of Hanover Park Illinois. Prior to joining INL, she spent 23 years in corporate America working for Motorola Solutions in Chicago, IL, an $8 billion technology organization. Carter also spent time in the pharmaceutical and food service industries. She worked for K&B (Katz and Besthoff, now Rite-Aid) and Phar-Mor Pharmacies as a pharmacy technician and as a manager for McDonald’s and Taco Bell Corporations.

In April of 2007, Carter was elected as Hanover Park’s first black council member. Carter’s position at the Village allowed her to assist with the recruitment, selection, and appointment of department heads and to help create policy operation strategies. During this time, Carter founded the Village’s Cultural Inclusion and Diversity committee, the largest volunteer committee in the Village. After two years of confronting challenging opportunities, she became the Village’s first black deputy mayor.

In her position, Carter created a homeless prevention task force that focused on providing solutions to reduce the impact of the 2008-2010 economic crisis, preventing home foreclosures and providing transitional housing for residents. In 2008, she was appointed to Hanover Park’s Crime Prevention Task Force, a team that helped design crime prevention strategies and methodologies for the Village. The same year, Hanover Park named her Inclusion and Diversity Champion, and she received an Outstanding Leadership Award from Motorola’s Women’s Business Council.

Carter has earned numerous awards for her humanitarian efforts. In 2020, she was named Idaho National Laboratory’s Community Award recipient. In 2019, she earned Idaho’s Hometown Hero Award Medal and was one of Idaho Business Review’s Women of the Year. In 2018, she was recognized as one of DiversityMBA’s Top 100 Executive Leaders Under 50. In 2015, the National Diversity Council honored Toni with the Leadership Excellence Award for corporate inclusion, and she was named Inclusion and Diversity Champion of the Year by Diversity MBA. In 2013, the Illinois Commission on Diversity and Human Relations honored Carter with the Dr. King Workforce Inclusiveness and Community Activism award. The 2010 issue of Who’s Who in Black Chicago named her one of the most influential blacks in government. She is a member of the National Society for Human Resource Management, and the Delta Mu Delta International Honor Society in Business. She is a certified diversity practitioner and professional development coach. She is currently pursuing certifications as a change management and organizational development professional. She earned a bachelor and a master of science degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Carter dedicates part of her life to helping people who have been abused. Her memoir, When Trouble Finds You, is being used as a tool of hope, inspiration, and education for others who may have suffered the way she did as a child. When Carter is not spending time with her three wonderful children - Candes, John, and Taylor - she loves building community relationships and leveraging strategic partnerships.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 30 Aug 2022 09:58:15 -0400 2022-09-09T16:00:00-04:00 2022-09-09T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion NERS Fall 2022 Colloquia Series
NERS Colloquia Series: Department Welcome (September 16, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/96985 96985-21793648@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 16, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

The Chair of the U-M Department of Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences will give a recap of the past school year and a preview of what's to come.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 17 Aug 2022 09:54:49 -0400 2022-09-16T16:00:00-04:00 2022-09-16T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion NERS Fall 2022 Colloquia Series
NERS Colloquia Series: NERS Alumni Award Talk (September 23, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/96986 96986-21793649@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 23, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

A Career in Pulsed Power—a 40-Year Retrospective and the Next 20 Years

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 30 Aug 2022 10:25:45 -0400 2022-09-23T16:00:00-04:00 2022-09-23T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion NERS Fall 2022 Colloquia Series
NERS Colloquia Series: Turbulence in High-Energy-Density Plasma (October 7, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/96987 96987-21793650@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 7, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Abstract
Hydrodynamic instabilities are understood to pose a serious challenge to achieving inertial confinement fusion ignition. During implosion, the injection of cold, inert materials into what should be a hot, burning region quenches energy production. In supernovae undergoing the reverse process of explosion, instabilities are favored to explain the observed transport of material from stellar depths to the outer debris. Yet, questions have remained concerning the true mechanism by which instabilities in such high-energy-density (HED) environments achieve these effects. While in classical fluids, instabilities typically pass through nonlinearity into the disordered phase known as “turbulence,” it has long been questioned whether in a dense plasma the new degrees of freedom (ionization, plasma waves, radiation transport, etc.) might modify or even prohibit that path.With a new generation of HED experiments, the field can at last answer this question in the affirmative, that HED turbulence can develop analogously to classical fluids [Doss et al. Phys. Plasmas 27 032701 (2020)]. Building on the efforts of many in validating early-time behavior, a four-year campaign using LLNL’s National Ignition Facility successfully measured the deeply nonlinear regimes and confirmed that turbulence emerges as the instabilities develop, even in timescales as short as 10s of nanoseconds. Following background and an overview of other families of experiments, we review the Shock/Shear campaign which conclusively demonstrated HED turbulence by studying shear flow subject to the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, the most well-understood classical route to turbulence. A comprehensive scaling analysis unifies data from over 50 distinct NIF experiments, themselves scaled ~10 orders of magnitude from classical fluid shear experiments.
*This work was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. DOE by LANL under contract 89233218CNA000001. LA-UR-22-24038

Bio
Forrest Doss has since 2011 been a scientist in Los Alamos’s Theoretical Design Division, and since 2018 has also been a liaison to Sandia’s Pulsed Power Sciences Center. He was the long-time PI for LANL’s High-Energy-Density Hydrodynamics Experiments, and is currently Project Leader for Applied Hydrodynamics. He has been principal designer for over 50 shots at NIF, and several experiments on the Sandia Z Machine. Forrest holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from West Virginia University, a Certificate of Advanced Study in Math from Cambridge, and a PhD in Applied Physics from UM.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 04 Oct 2022 10:17:53 -0400 2022-10-07T16:00:00-04:00 2022-10-07T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion NERS Fall 2022 Colloquia Series
NERS Colloquia Series: Glenn Knoll Lecture (October 21, 2022 4:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/96988 96988-21793651@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 21, 2022 4:00am
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Speaker: Josh Grindlay, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian
"Development of the High Resolution Energetic X-ray Imager (HREXI)"

There are many science goals for HREXI as the imaging detector (16 x 16 CZTs/ASICs) for a coded aperture telescope on 2 SmallSats to be proposed in 2023 as a Small Explorer (SMEX) mission in 2028 followed by 10 additional SmallSats for a MIDEX mission to be proposed in 2028 that would enable (by 2030) the very first Full-Sky, continuous viewing, high-resolution imaging and spectra of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) from the collapse to stellar mass (~10 - 30 solar mass) black holes from the very first massive stars (PopIII) formed ~100 million years after the Big Bang. These stars cannot individually be observed by the JWST telescope, but HREXI imaging CZT arrays can readily detect their extremely luminous (in X-, Gamma-rays) GRBs and provide measurements of the epoch (in redshift) of these very first massive stars that ionized the Universe. This talk will be mainly about the CdZnTe (CZT) detectors and their readout from 3 - 300 keV for imaging and spectra.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 14 Oct 2022 13:38:09 -0400 2022-10-21T04:00:00-04:00 2022-10-21T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion NERS Fall 2022 Colloquia Series