The PhD research will be conducted at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KU Leuven. The main supervision will be done by Prof. N. Horsten, who is appointed as academic chair for the thermal-hydraulics research on lead-cooled Small Modular nuclear fission Reactors (SMRs). In addition, there will be direct supervision from Prof. M. Blommaert, head of the Innovative Design for Energy Applications Lab (IDEAL) (Innovative Design for Energy Applications - IDEAL IDEAL). There will be close collaboration with the Thermal and Fluids Engineering (TFE) group of Prof. M. Baelmans (Welcome to the group of thermal and fluids engineering! Thermal and Fluids Engineering). Links to the website of both entities can be found below.

Project

Gradient-based optimization has revolutionized the designs of heat exchangers. Techniques such as shape and topology optimization are getting increasingly popular for practical applications due to the advancements in production te...