Christopher J Hurt

Bio

Dr. Christopher J. (C.J.) Hurt is a Research and Development Professional Staff member in the Neutron Science Directorate (NScD) Research Reactors Division (RRD)'s Reactor and Modeling Analysis Team.  He has been working with the Reactors Research Division since 2012, when he began his doctoral work which included thermal-structural safety analyses to qualify Pu-238 production in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) permanent reflector, as well as development of a versatile discrete ordinates tool in COMSOL Multiphysics .  He graduated with his Ph.D. in late 2016 from the University of Tennessee’s Nuclear Engineering Department, where he continued working at ORNL as a post-doctoral staff in experiment analysis until assuming his current position in 2018.  Prior to joining ORNL, he developed a criticality accident simulator for Y-12 and prior to that received his bachelor’s in nuclear engineering from UT in 2011.

Dr. Hurt is a Reactor and Modeling Analysis team member in RRD’s Nuclear & Experiment Safety Analysis group, where he supports the safe, reliable, and high-performance operation of HFIR through reactor analysis, modeling, and simulation in a variety of applications including fuel element evaluations.  He continues to support the Pu-238 production project using NpO₂/Al cermet target material as the steady-state thermal-structural and CFD analyst for target qualification and the high-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium fuel conversion project as an analyst for reactor thermal hydraulics transients.  He is also the Chairperson of the RRD Software Configuration Control Board and manages a software and hardware suite that support RRD nuclear safety missions.

Dr. Hurt’s primary research interests and responsibilities include using finite element analysis (FEA) for heat transfer, solid mechanic and computational flow dynamic (CFD) simulation of HFIR core components and experiments, transient thermal hydraulic & reactor plant accident analysis, as well as reactor physics and depletion studies.  His currently uses computational tools such as COMSOL Multiphysics, MCNP, RELAP-5, SCALE (ORIGEN-S, KENO), Fortran, MATLAB, Java, and Python, among others.

Publications