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The author has been teaching a survey course on nuclear energy in the past several years with internet resources without textbooks. The resources are organized in a way to facility inductive learning but with available documents for deductive learners as well. The course has received good reviews from students as the topics are relevant and the teaching encourages deep learning.
Recently there has been an increase in the demand for the utilization of clean renewable energy sources. This is a direct result of a rise in oil prices and an increased awareness of human induced climate change. Wind energy has been shown to be one of the most promising sources of renewable energy. With current technology, the low cost of wind energy is competitive with more conventional sources...
Countries around the world are deploying radiation detection instrumentation to interdict the illegal shipment of radioactive material crossing international borders. These efforts include deployments in the U.S. and in a number of other countries by governments and international organizations. Most deployed radiation portal monitor systems are based on plastic scintillator for gamma-ray detection...
It is well known that in the Hungarian PWR-type nuclear power plant Paks the radioactive waste waters are collected in common tanks. These water streams contain radioactive isotopes in ultra-low concentration and inactive compounds as major components (borate 1.7 g/dm3, sodium-nitrate 0.4 g/dm3, sodium-hydroxide 0.16 g/dm3, and oxalate 0.25 g/dm3). These low salinity solutions were evaporated by adding...
The jatropha curcas methyl ester can be produced through a transesterification reaction by using an alkaline catalyst with an alcohol as the excess reactant. The reaction was carried out in a batch mixed reactor under various operating condition. The kinetics study on the transesterification of jatropha curcas-based triglycerides with methanol was carried out under various temperatures (323, 328,...
A new model for turbulent flows in porous media is summarized. The spatial- and time fluctuations in this new model are tied together and treated as a single quantity. This novel treatment of the fluctuations leads to a natural construction of the k and e type equations for rigid and isotropic porous media in which all the kinetic energy filtered in the averaging process is modeled. The same terms...
This article addresses the feasibility of commercial biodiesel production in Jordan as an alternative fuel source. The study suggests that the most effective method of producing biodiesel in a country like Jordan could be based on large-scale microalgae cultivation. Since many strains of microalgae exist, it would first be necessary to identify the species most appropriate for growth in the Jordanian...
Beryllium carbide is under investigation as a possible structural or moderator material in fission and fusion systems. While many of the physical properties of beryllium carbide have already been studied, neutronic properties such as the thermal scattering cross-section are not well known. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the scattering cross section of beryllium carbide through quantum mechanical...
To study the behavior of nuclear reactors like the Russian VVER reactors it is necessary to solve the time dependent neutron diffusion equation using a hexagonal mesh. This problem can be solved by means of a modal method, which uses a set of dominant modes to expand the neutron flux. To obtain this set of modes a differential eigenvalue problem for a steady state has to be solved. The spatial part...
Computer games have an enormous potential to grab the undivided attention of kids ranging from 13 to 23 years of age. This paper explores a new game engine called Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK) to enhance teaching and content retention of some concepts in nuclear reactor engineering. Game engine technology commonly used to develop computer and video games can be used to model and simulate 3-D...
The main objective of the presented work is to investigate the effect of Grid-Connected Photovoltaic systems on the voltage regulation of a residential electricity network in Saudi Arabia. Firstly, a typical residential network is used as the base case. Actual data for both loads and irradiance has been used to build a realistic model. Then, two main situations are set up for peak and light load conditions...
A novel approach is presented that utilizes the concept of distance education in nuclear reactor physics laboratory education. This educational model is based on establishing an Internet Reactor Laboratory (IRL). Video conferencing and online reactor instrumentation and data acquisition systems are utilized to provide reactor laboratory sessions to students at other academic institutions within or...
Wind farms have been built all over the world, and successfully proven as one of the important substitutes of alternative energy. Nowadays, there have been some series ideas in Saudi Arabia to find out energy solutions. This research aims to study the feasibility of design and construction of wind farms in Saudi Arabia from the geographic, economic and technical view.
A program has been written in Matlab for image segmentation based on user adjustable grayscale thresholding that can be used not only to locate and select important features in a given image but also count the number of pixels in the selection thereby sizing the feature(s) as a fraction of the total area occupied by the image. The program has been validated against ground truth realities of some locally...
A 3D parallel numerical tool developed to simulate heat conduction between packed spheres is presented, validated and compared with its serial version. This tool allows computing heat transfer in any arrangement of spheres in contact and under different boundary conditions. The parallel version is simple to implement as different spheres are handled by different processors. Additionally, a special...
The concept of power system stability reserve margin as a metric for the distance to the risk of blackout has evoked speculations during investigations of the global dynamics of events recently reported for stressed systems worldwide. Among the speculations made is the possible existence of `many' such stability reserves. In this paper, it is shown that differences in the steady-state stability limit...
Three dimensional (3-D) virtual reality models can be an effective tool for education and training in nuclear engineering applications. This technology can be used to model and simulate nuclear facilities with the help of custom-made packages and programming. This paper introduces useful features of a well known game engine, Unreal Engine III, for nuclear-specific virtual reality models. Specifically,...
Dynamic modeling is important to predict the energy production of Photovoltaic (PV) systems. It is needed to make informed technical and economical decisions. The simulation models of PV systems in literature are good enough for steady state analysis, but they are not suitable for dynamic analysis of grid operating and control conditions. This paper proposes a dynamic PV model suitable for Decentralized...
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