Maximilian Kraus, in his second year of a PhD in Engineering, has recently presented his research at key conferences in his field.
At the International Conference on the Physics of Reactors (PHYSOR), in San Francisco, Maximilian presented his PhD research work in the track on “Methods for Reactor Analysis”. In this PhD project, Maximilian is developing a method to simulate the evolution of the neutron flux in nuclear reactors over time, which is crucial for safety and design analyses of new reactor concepts, and he is thereby extend the existing Random Ray Method to time-dependent studies. He plans to incorporate insights from John Tramm of Argonne National Laboratory, the original developer of the Random Ray Method, into his code and to submit a journal article to "Nuclear Science and Engineering", which will be published as a special edition following the conference.
At the Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS), in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Maximilian presented findings from a side project he pursued at the start of his PhD, concerning the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket concept, which was proposed in the 1990s. This design claimed to have excellent performance, however, no one had ever carried out analyses to back these assumptions. Maximilian's studies revealed that these claims were largely unfounded and vastly overestimated.