Alam and Vergari receive Distinguished Early Career Awards from DoE Nuclear Energy University Program

Illinois Grainger Engineering faculty members received two of three Distinguished Early Career Awards administered by the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program for the 2025 fiscal year. These awards provide support to early career researchers as they establish independent programs of nuclear energy research and education.

Nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering professors Syed Bahauddin Alam and Lorenzo Vergari were each awarded $800,000. Their research programs are both dedicated to the development of next-generation technology for more powerful and safer nuclear energy production.

Alam’s program is titled “Virtual Sensing Framework with Hybrid Measurement Technique for Real-Time Monitoring of Advanced Reactors.” He aims to augment sensor data with artificial intelligence-driven virtual modeling to assess nuclear reactor states without additional instrumentation. By replacing hardware-intensive sensing with intelligent reconstruction, the cost of instrumentation and control is reduced, reactor designs are simplified, and system conditions are determined in a faster, more complete manner.

The project will proceed by combining experimental data from distributed fiber optic sensing with simulation data to develop virtual sensors that can conduct real time monitoring. The power of virtual sensing is that it can use observations to infer the state of reactor parts not covered by physical sensors. Possible reasons for this inaccessibility are lack of sensor coverage and sensor defects and errors. The combined data is then used in conjunction with machine learning methods to detect anomalies.

“Our goal is to sense the unsensed and to measure the unmeasurable,” Alam said. “We’re developing new AI algorithms that reconstruct internal conditions in real time without the need for additional sensors, including hard-to-reach regions where sensors cannot be deployed. This will redefine how nuclear reactors are monitored and controlled, helping to ensure the United States is at the forefront of nuclear energy.”

Vergari’s program is titled “Chemo-Mechanical Degradation of Nuclear Graphite in Molten Salt Reactors.” He will conduct experimental work to address a gap in our understanding of how the material properties of graphite — a key component of molten salt reactors — evolve under the extreme heat, radiation and mechanical stress inside nuclear reactors. The results will have implications for the safety and operating lifetimes of reactor components.

Although graphite already has excellent mechanical, nuclear and thermo-physical properties, there is existing experimental work demonstrating that they do change under reactor conditions. Moreover, a change in one property creates a change in another. For example, a change in mechanical strength can change resistance to chemical reactions and vice versa.

“These kinds of interdependencies have been studied in metals, but our knowledge of how these coupled phenomena impact graphite is very limited,” Vergari said. “This project directly tackles this gap, investigating chemo-mechanical degradation in molten salts and ultimately estimating how these effects limit the lifespan of graphite components in nuclear reactors.”

Illinois Grainger Engineering affiliations

Syed Bahauddin Alam is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering. He is also affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Lorenzo Vergari is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering.