MAE Seminar: Abhinav Gupta

Advanced nuclear reactors present a transformative potential in energy applications, due to their portability, reliability, resilience, and high operational capacity. Scaling these reactors to broader implementation demands a reduction in capital construction cost as well as lifecycle maintenance costs while also ensuring safety through structural and operational integrity. Autonomous operations through Digital Twin (DT) technologies offer a promising pathway to achieving these goals by enhancing system health awareness and minimizing downtime. It has the potential to transform high precision manufacturing and construction management by facilitating modular assembly on site. Center for Nuclear Energy Facilities and Structures (CNEFS) of NC State University, has developed digital technologies to address these aspects and continues to validate them through actual implementation via laboratory and field tests. This seminar will present an overview of the current state of research at CNEFS in these specific areas.

Professor Abhinav Gupta is the Director and Professor at Center for Nuclear Energy Facilities and Structures in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at NC State University. He has served as the Chair of SMiRT25 conference and presently serves on the Board of International Association of SMiRT as Advisory General. He has served as chair of national level committees for several professional organizations including ASCE and ASME. He has also served in the role of a visiting faculty at US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Presently, he serves on the External Advisory Board of European Commission’s METIS consortium led by Electricite de France. His research publications have received best paper awards at the various ASME and ANS conferences. He has served on the editorial board of ASCE’s Journal of Structural Engineering and as a Guest Editor for Nuclear Engineering and Design. He is also the founding member of North Carolina’s Nuclear Energy Industry Advisory Council. At the university, he is currently assisting with two feasibility studies. One for the possibility of building a new research and test reactor on campus and the other for building a full-scale molten salt loop for energy storage.