Bruno P. Serrão

B.S., Nuclear Engineering, UFRJ
M.Sc., Nuclear Engineering, UFRJ

Bruno received his bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in April 2015. During his undergraduate degree, he worked as tutor for the modern physics course. He was also an undergraduate researcher at the Process Monitoring Lab, where he built his knowledge in Fortran computational language. His final project was an interesting application of several nuclear engineering concepts, where he analyzed two different types of nuclear fuels for two accident scenarios applying numerical methods to solve the heat conduction equation coupled with the point kinetics equations.

In 2015, just after receiving his bachelor's degree, he started graduate school at the same university. Still working as a researcher in the Process Monitoring Lab, he worked in a project to update an old environmental control system used in Angra I nuclear power plant. His master's thesis applied an optimization model called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to an atmospheric dispersion program to get the real wind characteristics in the case of an accident radioactive release. He received his master's degree in February 2018.

In May 2016, Bruno got a job opportunity as a nuclear engineer at AMAZUL and moved to Sao Paulo. In this public company, he worked on the licensing process of the new Brazilian Multipurpose Reactor (RMB) project. During this time, he was invited to present the reactor systems and functions at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in July 2017. He also worked with the RMB PSAR developing group.

Bruno started his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech in Fall 2019 and he is working on a two-phase pool boiling experiment focused on evaluating the behavior of heat transfer and void fraction under such conditions.