pushing fusion - college of engineering

Pushing Fusion

SUMMER 2007

PURDUE NUCLEAR

SPRING 2010

Nuke WeekFusing facts and fun

Subatomic ExplorerA faculty researcher’s quest

Mission AccomplishedAn alum’s role in the Apollo Project

The high stakes, big rewards of nuclear research

up front

Paul Wootton/sciencephoto.com

Vincent Walter

About the Cover

Our cover image is conceptual computer artwork of nuclear fusion providing energy to power the electrical grid. Purdue’s Center for

Materials Under Extreme Environments is making strides in fusion research that could lead to dramatic societal improvements.

Purdue Nuclear Engineering Impact

On My MindWelcome to the Spring 2010 edition of Nuclear Engineering Impact — my first as the head of the school. Given its thematic leanings of responsible risk-taking, this issue is very close to my own research heart. As director of Purdue’s Center for Materials Under Extreme Environments, I have the daily pleasure of working alongside extremely bright and passionate researchers and graduate students both on campus and throughout the world. Our collective breakthroughs on the cutting edge of fusion — as detailed in the cover story — could dramatically change humanity for the better.

I am equally proud of the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who continuously demonstrate the best of our best. From undergraduates promoting nuclear power benefits while simultaneously dispelling nuclear myths throughout Nuke Week, to the graduate students looking for better ways to help each other through our challenging programs, to our alums who are finding success in many fields, it’s easy to see why our relatively small school is so highly regarded among top nuclear programs.

I hope you’ll take the time to read their stories, understand the importance of big-risk, big-reward research, and continue to remain informed and excited about the possibilities of nuclear engineering. And whether you’re an alumnus, a research partner, or simply a friend, your connection to and support of the School of Nuclear Engineering is sincerely appreciated.

Ahmed HassaneinPaul L. Wattelet Professor and Head of Nuclear Engineering

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERINGTM

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UP FRONT

From Ahmed’s mind

aROUNd Ne

Messages and images from another Nuke Week 2

cOveR sTORy

The cutting edge of fusion 4

UP clOse: FacUlTy

Exploring the atomic universe 8

UP clOse: alUmNi

A nuclear engineer’s alternative path 9

UP clOse: sTUdeNTs

New grad student organization 10

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School of Nuclear Engineering

Administration Head ................................................. Ahmed Hassanein

Director of Development ...................... Madonna Wilson

Production & Media Director of Publications ................................. Julie Rosa

Editor .................................................... William Meiners

Production Coordinator ............................... Eric Nelson

Graphic Designer ....................................... Debra Green

Contributing Writer ................................. Gina Vozenilek

Photographers ................................... Andrew Hancock,

Mark Simons, Vincent Walter, Jason Young

Copy Editor .................................................. Dan Howell

Nuclear Engineering Impact is produced twice a year by Purdue’s Office of Marketing and Media.

Nuclear Engineering ImpactOffice of Marketing and MediaPurdue University507 Harrison St.West Lafayette IN 47907-2025E-mail: [email protected]

Articles herein may be reprinted by nonprofit organizations without permission. Appropriate credit would be appreciated.

To make a gift to the School of Nuclear Engineering, please contact: Madonna Wilson, Director of Development and Alumni Relations (765) 494-6490

Purdue is an equal access/equal opportunity university.

Spring 2010

contents

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Nuke Week Dispelling myths and spreading the good news on nuclear technology

The Purdue student chapter of the American Nuclear Society launched another Nuke Week in October, spreading the facts (and having some fun) about nuclear energy to fellow Boilermakers.

Sometimes a free meal, a few laughs, and good bit of information can go a long way in re-educating students on controversial subject matters. Such was the case and approach in October as Purdue’s student chapter of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) launched yet another Nuke Week on campus.

With the goal of eliminating stigmas associated with anything involving radiation, the students offered a cheeseburger cookout (where a sizable hungry line formed in the Purdue Mall in spite of the rainy day), held Nuclear Olympics

complete with a banana-eating contest and radiation suit relays, and passed out fact-filled brochures on the benefits of nuclear power.

“Nuke Week is our chance to get out in the campus

community and put out a positive word for nuclear technology,” says Jason Young, a junior in nuclear engineering and the ANS president. “People still

often have the misconception that radiation and anything

nuclear-related is bad.”Through bananas, a fruit with its

own radiation, the ANS students are helping demonstrate how the everyday amounts of radiation surrounding us are not harmful.

Benj Revis, a nuclear electronics technician and the staff advisor to the group, helped organize Friday tours of Purdue’s nuclear reactor. “Both tours for Nuke Week were full with many people asking if there would be other times made available,” says Revis (BS ’02 electrical engineering technology).

Revis likens PUR-1, Indiana’s only nuclear reactor, to allowing the students to test drive an automo-bile, complete with an expert in-structor. “The students have spent the previous several years learning the math and science behind how a reactor is designed and controlled,” he says. “Then they have the oppor-tunity to sit in the ‘driver’s seat’ and put their understanding to the test alongside a licensed operator.”

Though the fear of nuclear power has diminished in recent years, the need to promote the industry is something quickly learned by any nuclear engineering student. For Young, who took eagerly to physics and math as a younger student, the looming concerns over energy put him on the nuclear path. “Windmills and solar power are excellent alter-native sources of energy,” he says, “but we still have to have a main source.”

For Young and his mates, trying to win friends and influence skeptics, nuclear power could be best suited for that job. n William Meiners

around ne

Nuke Week is our chance to get out in the campus community and put out a positive word for nuclear technology. Jason Young, a junior in nuclear engineering

and the ANS president.

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”

Even with the beginning of a rainy October, Purdue students turned out on the Purdue Mall for radiation suit relays, tours of the radiation lab, and a banana-eating contest. (Photos by Jason Young and Mark Simons)

Spring 2010

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extreme research

Spring 2010

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Purdue’s Center for Materials Under Extreme Environments (CMUXE) is the crucible for some high-stakes, fast-paced research in nuclear engineering. One could say that the researchers who work at CMUXE (acronym pronounced see-muck-see) are themselves under extreme conditions, because the risks they take in their laboratory could translate to revolutionary improvements for society. Such promise really turns up the pressure to succeed.

At CMUXE right now, researchers are not only making major advances in the global race for the next generation of computer microchips, but they are also pushing forward to achieve critical objectives in the development of nuclear fusion as a source of nearly limitless clean energy. Projects of this scope and importance mean long hours and little sleep for CMUXE director Ahmed Hassanein, the Paul L. Wattelet Professor of Nuclear Engineering and head of the School of Nuclear Engineering. A source of seemingly limitless human energy, Hassanein works seven days a week on these pressing issues. The payoff so far, according to Hassanein, has been “excellent.”

Microchips and plasmaAdvances in computer technology to date have been progressing according to an unofficial rule called Moore’s law, which holds that that the number of transistors on integrated circuits, or chips, doubles about every 18 months. But that pace cannot continue indefinitely with current technology, which uses ultraviolet light to create the fine features in computer chips in a process called photolithography, which involves projecting the image of a mask onto a light-sensitive material, then chemically etching the resulting pattern.

“We can’t make devices much smaller using conventional lithography, so we have to find ways of creating beams having more narrow wavelengths,” says Hassanein.

How one Purdue Nuclear Engineering collaborative really could change the world

By Gina Vozenilek

Applying research from nuclear fusion processes, he and his team hope to reduce the size and increase the speed of microchips with nano-lithography. The new plasma-based lithography under development gener-ates “extreme ultraviolet” light having a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, less than one-tenth the size of current lithography, Hassanein explains.

Nuclear engineers and scientists at Purdue and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are working to improve the efficiency of two techniques for producing the plasma: One approach uses a laser and the other “discharge-produced” method uses an electric current.

“In either case, only about 1 to 2 percent of the energy spent is converted into plasma,” Hassanein says. “That conversion efficiency means you’d need greater than 100 to 200 kilowatts of power for this lithography, which poses all sorts of engineering problems. We are involved in optimizing conversion efficiency — reducing the energy requirements — and solving various design problems for the next-generation lithography.”

Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared in the October-December 2009 issue of the Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS. The paper was writ-ten by Hassanein, recently promoted research professor Valeryi Sizyuk,

computer analyst Tatyana Sizyuk, and research assistant professor Sivanandan Harilal, all in the School of Nuclear Engineering.

The original expectation in the sci-entific community was that a new chip would be ready for production in 2011. But Hassanein notes that there are sig-nificant challenges in this highly compli-cated and proprietary field that are not yet solved. Now he and his colleagues hope that the world will have its new breed of computers within five years.

So the race continues. Engineers around the world are striving to be the first to deliver the new technology to the marketplace. “We have to take greater risk and pursue wild ideas,” ex-plains Hassanein. “We don’t have the luxury to wait on this. We need ideas that are credible and can be tested im-mediately. The field is looking for highly innovative ideas, and the one that breaks through is going to skyrocket.”

Hassanein admits that the rush might be deflecting attention from oth-er solutions that would require longer-term testing. “That’s what I don’t like,” he says. “Some other technologies might be better, but the market can’t afford to wait!”

Simulation enhances experimentation Research at CMUXE is predicated on a dual system that uses very complicat-ed, high-end simulation to steer labora-tory experimentation. “Better labs exist,” Hassanein says, “but CMUXE’s com-bined capacity of computer prediction and experimentation is rare. Purdue is leading the U.S. in modeling plasma- material interactions in fusion devices.”

The computer package in use is called HEIGHTS — for high-energy interac-tion with general heterogeneous target systems — developed by Hassanein’s team when he was a senior scientist at Argonne and recently enhanced at Purdue. HEIGHTS combines computa-tions in plasma physics, radiation trans-port, atomic physics, plasma-material interactions and magnetohydrodynamics, or what happens when a target is heated, melts, and turns into a plasma. Detailed computations for a single HEIGHTS sim-ulation using Argonne supercomputers can take several months to complete.

HEIGHTS simulates the entire pro-cess of the plasma evolution: the laser interacting with the target, and the target evaporating, ionizing, and turning into a

Sivanandan Harilal, an assistant professor, Ahmed Hassanein, the Paul L. Wattelet Professor of Nuclear Engineering, and graduate students Ryan Coons, and Filippo Genco are part of the Purdue nuclear team focused on fusion. (Photo by Vincent Walter)


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extreme research continued

plasma. The simulation also shows what happens when the magnetic forces “pinch” the plasma cloud into a smaller diameter spot needed to generate the photons.

Simulations of the laser-produced plasma beams match data from labo-ratory experiments recently conducted at Purdue, a confirmation that keeps the research momentum rolling. “It was very exciting to see this match because it means we are on the right track,” Hassanein says. “The computer simulations tell us how to optimize the entire system and where to go next with the experiments to verify that.” HEIGHTS has also been used to verify worldwide fusion experiments and nanolithography applications.

Fusion’s futureMarket pressure urges plasma re-search forward for the sake of faster computers, but an even more com-pelling force moves researchers to master nuclear fusion: clean, abundant energy. “If we will be successful,” says Hassanein, “then we will have solved the energy crisis for a lifetime.”

Unlike the more guarded research on proprietary targets like microchip technology, the quest for fusion as en-ergy is massively collaborative. Teams of international researchers, includ-ing Hassanein, are focused on France,

where ITER is under

construction. When completed, ITER, which means “the way” in Latin and is an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, will demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful purposes.

But with international collaboration comes, inevitably, international politics. For some researchers like Hassanein, the progress on ITER is too slow com-pared with the urgency of the need for its results. He also worries because the U.S. involvement is dependent on the domestic political climate.

Hassanein would have liked to see some of the recently distributed federal stimulus funds invested in developing a stateside reactor like the one being built in France. “Ten billion dollars, a drop in the bucket of the total stimulus package, would have put nuclear fusion development on the fast track,” he says. “What else is more important? This is the greatest reason to spend money.”

The clash of politics and nuclear energy is a frustration nuclear engineer-ing doctoral candidate Filippo Genco is familiar. Genco, an Italian, saw his country give up on nuclear power in the wake of the accident at Chernobyl in 1986. “There was a great emotional wave following that disaster. It killed the plan to pursue nuclear energy for Italy,” Genco says.

Indeed, a 1987 referendum about the construction of new power plants proved to be the kiss of death for Italy’s nuclear power plants, which were phased out a year later. It has taken nearly two decades to reverse that trend of public mistrust of nuclear energy and recommit to the construction of nuclear power plants in Italy.

Married to a woman from the former Soviet republic who was living in Belarus at the time of the Chernobyl accident, Genco has thought a lot about the po-tential risks of nuclear power. “Nothing is without risk,” he says, “but engineering and science give us a chance to con-trol it. It is up to mankind to be ethical enough to use it wisely.”

Genco points out that many safe-guards had been ignored at Chernobyl. But perhaps the biggest problem came afterward, with the secrecy and silence that followed the disaster. “We have to be extremely careful, extremely con-scious of what is at stake,” he says.

Those stakes just got even higher for Genco, who became a father in June. “The future takes the form of a small baby now,” he says. “The field has a lot of promise for the future. How will we use our knowledge?”

Genco’s question is one that gets answered every day at CMUXE with innovation, perseverance, and responsible risk-taking. n

Our task is to be technologically and

ethically advanced. These two functions are on

parallel tracks. They must both operate on the

same high level.

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Spring 2010

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Gennady Miloshevsky (Photo by Andrew Hancock)

Insight into the “architecture” of proteins is just the first piece of the puzzle for researchers like Miloshevsky. “These 3-D images are only static snapshots of dynamic structures,” he explains. “The big challenge is to predict how they actually function in cells.”

Defects and abnormalities in the functioning of these nanobiostructures can give rise to a range of diseases, many of which affect the nervous system and have disastrous consequences for the organism. Understanding the behavior of nanobiostructures is crucial for developing molecular-level insights into the origin of many diseases. Then, Miloshevsky hopes, it will be possible to design new drug molecules and specific chemical therapies to prevent and alleviate the diseases.

Miloshevsky is happy to be working at Purdue. He says, “It is an exciting time for new projects, students, and innovative research on my own.” n Gina Vozenilek

A new faculty member has joined the School of Nuclear Engineering. Gennady Miloshevsky, research assistant pro-fessor, comes to Purdue from Brandeis University. He is ap-plying his expertise to important new work in fusion in the Center for Materials Under Extreme Environments (CMUXE). He is also keenly focused on proteins at the atomic level.

Miloshevsky, whose background is in physics, mathemat-ics, and computer science, is developing a computational project to model the hydrodynamic instability of liquid metal in a tokamak device. His goal is to be able to predict the behav-ior of the plasma-liquid interface, the development of waves, and the formation of liquid droplets and how they can splash into the plasma. Additionally, the stability of the liquid lithium surface within the tokamak is one of the most important prob-lems facing fusion scientists, Miloshevsky explains. He hopes to address this problem by designing his model to predict the flow of “thin lithium melt.”

Nuclear fusion experimentation is an expensive, high-stakes endeavor. But complex computer simulation helps research-ers keep moving ahead with confidence. “The predictions are aimed to understand the physics phenomena and to provide the guidance for experiments,” Miloshevsky explains. “Thus, the risks of these projects are not so high as before.”

Computational modeling aids Miloshevsky in his re-search on nanobiostructures as well. “Nanobiostructures has been a very active field of research during the past ten years. During this time a number of 3-D crystallograph-ic nanostructures of proteins were resolved at the atomic level. This means that now we know at which place each atom sits and how it is con-nected to other atoms,” he says.

up close: faculty

Model BehaviorNew nuclear engineering researcher dives deeply into nanobiostructures

Spring 2010

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A Nuke ReinventedNE alumnus turns risks into rewards

Timing really is everything. When Tom Murdock (MSNE ’65) left campus in the mid-1960s, there weren’t many opportunities for freshly minted nuclear engineers. But he took the skill sets he developed at Purdue (he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1963), took a few chances, and has since made a career of successfully switching gears.

A self-described PhD dropout, Murdock left the University of California, Berkeley, and went to work for a Los Angeles-based company called Electronic Associates. He says he was fortunate to have an alternate option in the fast-growing field of computer programming. As a Purdue graduate student, he was a teaching assistant for Eugene Hungerford who, at the time, was developing computer models for reactor radiation shielding calculations.

“Electronic Associates was doing hybrid computing,” Murdock says. “Back then, computing horsepower wasn’t sufficient to do intense numerical methods.”

The solution, he says, was to do the logic and processing on the digital side, then use an analog computer to do the heavy-duty math before passing it back to the digital side. The two years at Electronic Associates may have pre-pared him for work on one of the biggest achieve-ments of the 20th century.

Murdock took a job at McDonnell Douglas, relocated to Houston, and worked on the Apollo Project. “We had a contract with NASA to do Earth orbit and lunar orbit rendezvous and docking training for the astronauts,” Murdock says. “It was fun, heady stuff at the time. I can ac-tually say I’ve flown the Apollo command module. It never left the ground, but I’ve flown it.”

Never in his wildest dreams did Murdock imagine work-ing on the technological forefront of putting a man on the moon. “I just dove in and started working,” he says. “Had I stopped to think about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

After surviving three rounds of layoffs by McDonnell Douglas, Murdock landed in the insurance business of all places. For some 15 years, he helped create commercial business applications for American General.

Eventually weary of big business bureaucracy, Murdock and his wife Margo (BS ’64 mathmatics) decided they could

be happier and suc-cessful on a smaller level and took early retirements. He developed a PC-based product in investment portfolio management and became a software consultant.

“We typically work with companies who have five to 15 em-ployees that haven’t applied any man-agement principles to their IT resources,” he says. “We take it over so they can do their jobs, and we keep their computer hardware and soft-ware systems running.”

When many of his friends and former colleagues have long retired, Murdock, now living in Albuquerque, is not

content to ease into the golden years. “Part of my motivation is I watched my grandfather just rust out and die because he didn’t do

anything,” he says. “I decided I didn’t want to do that. So we keep active.”

Murdock’s career represents the risk and reward of staying open to possibilities. Still writ-

ing code and developing Windows software, he keeps active, in part, by remaining a lifelong learner.

The norm, at least in the 1960s, would have been to go to work, climb a company ladder, and retire from an upper management position. He took an alternative route, which, he believes, is becoming the new norm where people switch careers three or four times in a lifetime.

“I never thought of it as reinventing myself,” says Murdock.He says he enjoyed working on the forefront of the country’s

moon mission and starting his own company. Without thinking too much about the consequences of failing, Murdock — the nuclear engineer who never spent a day in the field — has still enjoyed the successful ride. n William Meiners

Tom Murdock (MSNE ’65)

up close: alumni

Lenka Kollar and Matt Fields helped create the Nuclear Engineering Graduate Organization in the fall. (Photos by Vincent Walter)


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Creating Community

New grad student organization formed

For many, the graduate school experience is never about winter sledding down Slayter Hill, keeping up with men’s and women’s Boilermaker basketball, or expanding on glass-raising social circles. Instead, the pro-totypical grad students may find themselves immersed in a few years of intense study and lab work, only coming up for air during fall, winter, and spring breaks. A new graduate student group within the School of Nuclear Engineering, however, is hoping to at least eliminate some of that sense of isolation.

In fall 2009, the Nuclear Engineering Graduate Organization (NEGO) took shape, held callout meetings, and elected officers for the first such organization of its kind in the school’s history. Proposed by Lenka Kollar and Matt Fields, two recent grads (both BSNE ’09) looking to earn master’s degrees at Purdue, NEGO was established to be both a social and a scholarly organization.

“Our school is unique in that we have so many different research disciplines that aren’t necessarily interconnected,” says Fields, the NEGO president. “A lot of the professors will have their own research groups, and there’s not much chance to spend time with your colleagues outside the same four people you see in the lab every day. We really wanted

to foster a sense of commu-nity within our small school with such diverse interests.”

For Kollar, who is serving as the organization’s first treasurer, the opportunity to give admit-ted graduate students the inside story on the various programs is a bonus. “Our school does a little bit of this, but we wanted to expand on that and make it more of a student-to-student talk,” she says.

Barbecues, study breaks, and other family-style social events will help bring the 50-plus graduate students from

the school together. But there’s also a push for more professional development. “In our discipline especially, being so heavily regulated, professional licensure and membership are important,” Fields says. “We need to encourage students to be respectful of that and to take advantage of Purdue’s reputation.”

NEGO could even help students find the common ground in the varied fields under the nuclear umbrella, such as fusion, materials, thermal hydraulics, neutronics, and laser research. Kollar decided to stay at Purdue to continue work in the area of nuclear waste storage with her advisor, Audeen Fentiman, professor of nuclear engineering and associate dean of graduate education and interdisciplinary programs. As a possible PhD and work for a government agency (such as the Department of Energy) loom in her future, Kollar knows the enhanced community experience of grad school could bode well for her future, as well as the future of her colleagues.

Like all nuclear engineering students, both undergrads and graduates, Kollar and Fields often find themselves becom-ing spokespersons for an industry. For Fields, now working in Ahmed Hassanein’s lab (see cover story on page 4), those discussions, along with the times, are changing. “A lot of the misconceptions are beginning to be eroded. Our genera-tion hasn’t really grown up being scared of nuclear power,” says Fields of his post-Chernobyl colleagues. “A lot of young people are very pro-nuclear. They’re very much interested in it from a clean energy and an industrial standpoint. For us, it’s a matter of furthering that understanding.”

Kollar concurs, saying she “sticks to the facts” when it comes to the world of nuclear engineering.

And now that NEGO is a fact of life for nuclear engineering grad students, maybe even half a hundred smart people can get together for some good clean fun. n William Meiners

up close: students

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50This fall the Purdue School of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating its 50th anniversary. That’s a half century of achievement. From launching Indiana’s first, and only, nuclear reactor to the building reputations of our undergraduate and graduate programs. From world-class research facilities to world-renowned researchers. From the promise of safe, clean energy to the future of fusion. This first 50 years is only a beginning.

As an alumnus or friend of the school, you have been integral to our success. Watch for event details on how you can help us celebrate in fall 2010.

Celebrating the Past,

Envisioning the FutureArchives and Special

Collections, Purdue University Libraries

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A scanning electron microscope picture of nacre, also known asmother-of-pearl, a biomineralized composite that is known for its strength and resilience. The image is from civil engineering’s Computational Multi-Scale Materials Modeling Group, led by Pablo Zavattieri, who also has a courtesy appointment in mechanical engineering. He has paired with David Kisailus, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside, to study the structure-mechanical property relationships of composites in order to develop new materials and structures that will offer a new combination of low weight, high strength/toughness and multifunctionality. The materials could have applications in the auto, energy, shipbuilding and defense industries, as well as widespread use in civil and aerospace engineering.

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