An experimentalist who focuses on multiphase flow and heat transfer, Caleb S. Brooks is the newest member of the NPRE faculty.
Brooks joins six other young assistant and associate professors who have been hired in the Department since 2011. Almost doubling NPRE’s total faculty numbers, these new hires expand Illinois’s expertise in areas of plasma/fusion technologies, probabilistic risk analysis, radiation detection, homeland security, nuclear materials, and nuclear reactor simulations and systems.
Brooks earned his PhD in August from Purdue University under the directions of Profs. Takashi Hibiki and Mamoru Ishii, with the dissertation, “Wall Nucleation and the Two-fluid Model in Subcooled Boiling Flow.” Brooks had been working as a graduate research fellow in Purdue’s Thermal Hydraulics and Reactor Safety Laboratory. He also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nuclear engineering from Purdue (2008 and 2012, respectively).
Brooks’ research focus will help to fill a gap created with the retirement of Emeritus Prof. Barclay G. Jones, who had made decades-long contributions to nuclear engineering aspects of thermal hydraulics, reactor safety, multiphase flow, boiling heat transfer, and human-machine interfaces for reactor control and simulation.
Brooks believes his modeling and experimental work will be a complement in developing and validating the equations that computer experts – such as NPRE Prof. Rizwan Uddin and Assistant Prof. Tomasz Kozlowski – use in nuclear reactor system simulations.
“With nuclear reactor safety, a lot of attention is going towards the improvement of computational tools,” he said. “Fundamental understanding of boiling and two-phase (water and steam) flows is still needed to improve the modeling and robustness of these tools.”
Information gained from his modeling work can improve the simulations’ precision. “It’s unfeasible to do full-scale experimental testing, so scaling becomes a very important consideration. Experiments at non-prototypical conditions need to be designed such that the findings can be applied to these very complex systems. With better experimental data more accurate modeling can be developed and implemented, and the simulations can be benchmarked.”
The work that Brooks does also can have applications for fusion energy, where extreme heat fluxes present challenges in cooling components; aerospace, in which microgravity conditions complicate traditional approaches to heat transfer; and oil and gas transport, in which fluid fluctuations and build-up of gas in pipes impacts system effectiveness and structural integrity.
In addition to collaborating with Uddin and Kozlowski, the newest NPRE faculty member foresees working as well with other faculty in NPRE and Engineering at Illinois.
“Illinois is such a great school – there are so many resources here,” said Brooks. “The NPRE faculty showed they are very interested in the type of research I do, and revamping the previous work of Prof. Jones. I could not have foreseen a better fit for my research and teaching interests than what has been provided here at Illinois.”