NPRE PhD Majdi Radaideh wins 2019 ANS Mark Mills Award

10/18/2019 Susan Mumm

NPRE PhD Majdi Radaideh, 2019 winner of the ANS Mark Mills Award, is the third NPRE alumnus in five years to have won the national award for graduate student work.

Written by Susan Mumm

NPRE PhD Majdi Radaideh wins 2019 ANS Mark Mills Award

Recent NPRE PhD Majdi Radaideh is the 2019 winner of the national American Nuclear Society Mark Mills Award. This is the third time in the past five years that an NPRE alumnus has won the honor for graduate student work.

The Mark Mills Award recognizes the graduate student author who submits the best original technical paper contributing to the advancement of science and engineering related to the atomic nucleus.

Radaideh has worked with his advisor, NPRE Prof. Tomasz Kozlowski, on the broad nature of “high-dimensional modeling.” Their goal was to develop a unified framework with techniques to design complex engineering systems under high-dimensional and uncertain inputs. Radaideh’s PhD thesis resolved six major gaps, all related to nuclear reactor safety:

  • Reformulating the uncertainty sources definition for nuclear simulations and developing an integrated uncertainty quantification methodology for nuclear computer codes. The methodology accounts for uncertainties from parametric to model-form with rigorous statistical basis.
  • Resolving dimensionality and computational cost issues in reactor simulations with deep learning. Example of prediction of a nuclear accident with deep neural networks can be seen in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3C6noCvgg4
  • Developing a nuclear multiphysics platform for physics coupling under uncertainty. The platform can perform three-way coupling of neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, and fuel performance simulations with minimal changes on the single physics models.   
  • Developing a new precursor-group methodology for evaluating kinetic parameters and their uncertainty. The methodology goes into deeper physics by looking into the precursor-group behavior of the delayed neutrons, which are critical for reactor safety.
  • Developing advanced burnup credit methodology for boiling water reactor (BWR) systems. The method provides best estimate plus uncertainty approach that ensures both economic and safe transportation of spent fuel casks of BWRs.
  • Combining all previous significant and other minor contributions into one hybrid and unified framework, summarized in the winning paper, https://doi.org/10.1002/er.4698.

Radaideh completed his PhD in NPRE over the past summer, and also earned a master’s degree from NPRE in 2016. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 2013 in nuclear engineering from the Jordan University of Science and Technology. Radaideh will be joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral research associate to work on nuclear core optimization using machine learning.

NPRE alumni Yinbin Miao and Xiang Liu won the Mark Mills Award in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Both students of NPRE Prof. James Stubbins, Miao and Liu concentrated their work on nuclear materials. Miao is a materials scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, while Liu is a postdoctoral research associate at Idaho National Laboratory.

Radaideh was appreciative of his time in NPRE.

"When I had my first step here four years ago, I never imagined that I would accomplish what I have accomplished," he said. "This for sure could not have happened without my supportive advisor, who gave me a lot of freedom in pursuing my research direction; my groupmates, who shared their data to validate a lot of my framework components; my teachers, who taught and guided me; and my department staff, who did their best to ensure our comfort and progress. No matter where I ended up working, the effect of this school and this department will stay always prominent. Thanks NPRE!”

 

 


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This story was published October 18, 2019.