Dr. Shikha Prasad and Dr. Jean Ragusa are recipients of development fellowships from the 2020-21 edition of the Texas A&M University System National Laboratories Office Collaborative Research Program with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Development fellowships are awarded to researchers who have the skills, knowledge and interest in developing lasting, collaborative relationships with LANL researchers.
Prasad focuses primarily on nuclear security and nonproliferation. Prasad will work alongside Matthew Devlin and Andrea Favali from LANL to measure neutron multiplicity from spontaneous fissions of plutonium-240, a human-made isotope and major constituent of several proposed advanced reactor designs.
“Despite such promising efforts, there is a lack of plutonium-240-measured nuclear data,” said Prasad. “The plutonium-240 measurements will help improve our understanding of reactor safety parameters, used nuclear fuel and other derivative man-made isotopes (plutonium-241 and americium-241).”
Ragusa researches computational and data sciences applied to national security and nuclear engineering. He received his fellowship for his computational research in high-energy-density physics.
Due to the interactions of coupled physical phenomena and large systems of equations involved, running these simulations requires the use of leadership-class supercomputers. Ragusa and his team will investigate machine-learning approaches to speed up thermal radiative transfer simulations.
“With Dr. Andrew Till and Dr. Pete Maginot, I will investigate several data-science approaches to significantly reduce the computational complexity of thermal radiative transfer simulations,” said Ragusa. “Our goal is to enhance algorithmic efficiency and build accurate surrogate models for faster simulations.”