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Work I have been involved in a variety of research activities during my 25+ years in the nuclear field. Most of my work, and the involvement of my students, have been associated with the broad field of computational reactor physics -- with a good mix of methods development and application. A good overview of the topics and the various papers, reports, and student theses that have documented this research can be obtained from a quick review of the information available via the Curriculum Vitae link. A slightly more organized and more detailed treatment of four key application areas is also given here, since much of my research can be categorized into one of these four general areas, as follows: I.
Computational Support for the UMLRR Much of my recent work over the last 5-8 years has focused on the first two topic areas, and a fair amount of detail can be obtained on these subjects by following the appropriate links to full versions of many of the papers and reports that were produced as part of these works. For example, for those interested in computer modeling of nuclear systems, the sequence of materials associated with the computational support for the UMass-Lowell research reactor (UMLRR) should be especially useful, since they provide lots of information about the modeling and analysis of a real reactor. In particular, the UMLRR is used extensively as an educational tool for our students in the Nuclear Programs at UMass-Lowell -- and the computer modeling and analysis information available here is often used to illustrate a variety of basic modeling concepts and to train the students in the use of some common reactor physics analysis tools (SCALE, VENTURE, DORT/TORT, MCNP, etc.). For completeness, I have also included some selected material from my research during the 1980-1995 period, where much of my research work was focused on general radiation transport analyses and core physics studies or on the subject of perturbation theory methods and applications (Topics III and IV from the above list). The last topic, in particular, is a favorite of mine, since much of my early work (and my MS and PhD theses) was related to the development and application of perturbation theory methods. Unfortunately, many of these early works are not readily available in electronic format, so the list of available materials with a full version tag is rather limited -- sorry!!! In any case, hopefully some of the stuff available here will be useful both to the seasoned practitioner and to the novice in the field of reactor physics. I certainly had a lot of fun with these projects and I learned a lot of practical reactor physics while generating these works -- I hope you enjoy!!! Special Note: I typically use Matlab to generate most of the plots for my papers and reports, MS Word to do the document processing, MathType to do the equation processing, and Adobe Acrobat to convert the *.doc files into *.pdf files. Unfortunately, compatibility issues among the various codes and among different versions of the same code have caused me many headaches over the years. What looks great in Matlab might be corrupted in Word, and what looks good in Word may be ugly or only half visible in the pdf version. This compatibility issue is apparent in many of the full version pdf files available from the links given above -- with many Matlab-generated plots having corrupted titles and others having overall poor quality/visibility in some of the pdf files. Unfortunately, some of the plots could not be re-generated and, even if they could be, it was simply too much work to re-create all the data needed to correct the affected plots. Thus, I have included the material "as is", and apologize ahead of time for the poor quality. In most cases, the substance of the data is still apparent, so the information is still useable. Hopefully, the poor quality will not be too much of a distraction -- since there really is a lot of good stuff here!!! Sorry… Last updated by Prof. John R. White (January 2003) Last | Top | Next |