Dr Eugenia Kuo

Role at ANSTO

Dr Engenia Kuo's main responsibilities are to use modelling and simulations at the atomic level to gain insight into and improve understanding of the properties and behaviours of nuclear materials, including wasteforms and advanced nuclear fuel materials.

Expertise

• Numerical simulations, data analysis and mathematical modelling of physical systems; current and past experience include the structures of nuclear materials, reactive gas transport and water flow in mine wastes, pattern formation in Rayleigh-Bénard convection systems.
• Current and past software used include: density functional theory (DFT) software: VASP,
• DMol3;
• Fluid flow software: Hydrus, Fastflo;
• Programming languages include MATLAB and FORTRAN;

Achievements

• Quantitative explanation and model of a (then) newly observed experimental phenomenon in rotating fluids. 
• Developed a theoretical model of gaseous convective instability in oxidising sulfidic mine heaps; this resulted in the distillation of a many parameter phenomenon onto a 2-parameter phase diagram showing the onset of the convective instability in terms of 2 dimensionless parameters. 
• Feasibility modeling study involving heat and gas transport in porous media: model development, numerical code implementation (using PDE2D/FORTRAN), numerical simulations, and results analysis.
• Assessment, using statistical analysis of hydrological data, of whether rainfall infiltration rates into a mine heap in the Northern Territory increased over an 18-year period. 
• Atomistic (density functional theory) modelling of nuclear materials, in particular of solutes in solid solution, to elucidate local interactions at an atomic scale; analysis of the local interactions has been used to explain or predict phenomena in the nuclear materials at a larger or macroscopic scale