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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering
Criticality Studies Of Actinides Within Fissures, Trevor Wilcox
Criticality Studies Of Actinides Within Fissures, Trevor Wilcox
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
The storage of nuclear waste in underground storage facilities presents numerous engineering challenges and risks. Experimental verification of engineered underground storage is impractical or prohibitively expensive, leaving scientists with few options. A 1995 report by Bowman and Venneri of the Los Alamos National Laboratory generated considerable controversy by hypothesizing that wastes composed of fissionable plutonium leached from underground storage containers could pose a nuclear criticality hazard. They proposed cases where plutonium collected in underground fractures could lead to sustained nuclear fission. In overmoderated cases, they argued that the resulting release of energy from fission could result in steam explosions, or …
Oxidation Modeling By Means Of Molecular Dynamics, Chaiyod Soontrapa
Oxidation Modeling By Means Of Molecular Dynamics, Chaiyod Soontrapa
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
Oxidation modeling is normally engineered to study systems at macroscopic scales, mostly in analytical forms based on diffusion theories. The associated time scale is usually in months, days, or minutes, and the length scale is in the order of microns. In this dissertation, oxidation modeling is performed at atomistic scale with the time and length scales in picoseconds and angstroms, respectively, using molecular dynamics. Molecular dynamics simulations generate trajectories of each atom or particle in a system according to the laws of physics. Studying oxidations under the atomistic point of view can offer new insights on atomic behaviors and influencing …