William Ríos López Email & Phone Number

Livermore, California, United States

National Ignition Facility Division. Enhancements in magnetron sputtering for B4C capsules promise to increase NIF’s ICF capabilities. The impact of the rotation speed on the formation of nodular defects on the capsule surface was examined with a mechanical setup in the coater chamber that ensured continuous rotation during the sputtering process. Confocal image analysis showed that faster substrate rotation speed increases the size, distribution, and density of nodular defects on the ablators' surface. Sponsored by the NNSA Minority Serving Institute Internship Program.

Puerto Rico

In 2022 I started a master’s thesis project under the supervision of UPRM Mechanical Engineer professors Silvina Cancelos and Carlos Marin in collaboration with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The research aims to develop and optimize a new generation of acoustic tension metastable fluid neutron detector. Acoustic Tension Metastable Fluid Detectors (ATMFDs) employs piezoelectric components that excites the working fluid pressure field towards a low resonance mode, prescribing the scale of the cavitation energy barrier. By correlating incident fast neutron flux to cavitation events in an acoustic chamber the detector is capable of determining the radiation level and trajectory. Current work is focused on pinpointing the most critical structural parameters of the detector and maximize the neutron detection efficiency for a desire voltage source. Further, the new ATMFD design is being proposed to ascertain neutron directionality.

Carlsbad, New Mexico, United States

During the second academic period of 2023-2024 I was selected as a 2024 DOE Scholar Fellow. The hybrid program aim was to provide support to the Carlsbad Field Office at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Under the guidance of Ph.D. Hung Chiou, an expert in radiation control, and Leon Duquella, the head of the Safety Program Division, the project's goal was to optimize the operation and maintenance of the radiation air monitor protocol for the WIPP Underground Ventilation System (UVS). By the end of the semester, the group had come up with both immediate and long-term fixes to reduce the amount of salt dust clogging the passivated ion-implanted planar silicon radiation detectors while maintaining the airflow threshold in the nuclear repository panels.

Menlo Park, California, United States

During the summer of 2023, I took part in the LCLS Summer Internship Program at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. I worked as a Design Engineer in the Matter in Extreme Condition (MEC) experimental hutch. This experimental hutch provides revolutionary capabilities to study the transient behavior of matter in extreme conditions of pressure and temperature. MEC phase contrast imaging is a diagnostic technique to measure the propagation of shock waves through a solid medium. For my internship project, I redesigned the Phase Contrast Imaging Detector optical lens system to increase the illuminations per pixel of the hutch's sCMOS camera without compromising the field of view of the shock wave. This novel design reduces external light noise, improves optical lens compactness and alignment configuration, and facilitates overall maintenance. By implementing an infinite optical system the numerical aperture was increased by 40% while the linear magnitude of the image remained fixed at the desired value.

Puerto Rico

Throughout this research experience, I worked under the guidance of Dr. David Serrano, a UPRM mechanical engineering professor. The research topic was electromagnetic eddy current generation, and my work aimed to determine critical optimization parameters of an electromagnetic heat induction design and use COMSOL Multiphysics Software to simulate the transient performance of the heater using a moving mesh. Systematic numerical studies showed great agreement of the simulation results with previously published experimental data.

United States

My mentor throughout this program was UTEP mechanical engineering professor Dr. Norman Love and my research project that I worked on as part of the Consortium of Hybrid and Resilient Energy Systems (CHRES) summer program was titled “Improving the Efficiency of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Recompression Closed Brayton Cycle (RCBCs)”. The main objective was to design and validate theoretical and computer-simulated models for the supercritical CO2 RCBCs Power Plant used at Sandia National Laboratory to study the longevity of this technology in the nuclear energy generation field. Using ASPEN Plus a model the thermodynamic cycle was generated with excellent correlation with theoretical and published experimental data. The main compressor inlet parameters were optimized to increase the cycle’s overall thermal efficiency by 2%. It was concluded that the computer model serves as a basic guideline for improvement of the RCBC cycle efficiency.

Throughout this research experience, I worked under the guidance of UPRM mechanical engineering professor Dr. David Serrano. The research topic was electromagnetic eddy current generation and the aim of my work was to determine critical optimization parameters of an electromagnetic heat induction design and use COMSOL Multiphysics Software to simulate the transient performance of the heater using a moving mesh. Validation studies showed great agreement of the simulation results with previously published experimental data.

Puerto Rico

The main project consisted of the installation and validation of an online condition monitoring program for the Utility building critical equipment. The implementation of this novel vibration sensor allowed near real-time monitoring and automated continuous analysis of vital mechanical components of the plant's water and glycol chillers. As a result, this technology proved to be capable of substituting previous vibration monitoring techniques, optimizing predictive maintenance, and reducing the probability of unwanted reactive maintenance. Additional side projects include the establishment of a data repository of build-of-material for all HVAC units, vibration collection and analysis of particular equipment, and determining suitable condition-based monitoring routes for future work orders.

Mayaguez, Puerto Rico

During the semester of the 2018-2019 academic year I worked alongside civil engineer Dr. Rossana Martinez on an undergraduate research project for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of Critical Load-Carrying Members. A novel flexibility matrix eigen-decomposition code (developed by Dr. Martinez) was used as a vibration-based method to determine structure damage. Migration of the code from MATLAB's proprietary programming language to Wolfram Mathematica was achieved. Critical data filtering built-in functions from MATLAB's Signal Processing Toolbox were also programmed and validated. The completion of these milestones was a key step for the development of a novel low-budget structural monitoring cyber-physical system.

Mayaguez, Puerto Rico

During the second semester of my second academic year, I joined Ph.D. Sudhir Malik subatomic particle research group at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez's Physic Department. The group specializes in the analysis and post-processing of data from the diagnostic systems in CERN's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Detector. I was first introduced to the basics of particle physics theory and the experimental efforts done at the Large Hadron Collider (LCS) synchrotron in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition, CMS Phase 2 Upgrade for the Inner and Outer Track was studied in detail to understand the new capabilities of the diagnostic subsystems. Finally, data from the CMS open-source repository was extracted using Python code to determine the momentum of different subatomic particles.

Ithaca, New York

During the summer we aim to study the material composition of the cooling system that removed the heat of the sensors located at the Inner Tracker of the CMS. One of the most crucial discoveries was theprobability of inducing small percentages of martensite (a ferromagnetic material phase of stainless steel) given the small diameter of the cooling tubes, extreme low temperature conditions and the deformations that the tubes were subjected to. Future experimental milestones were established to determine the magnitude of the CMS magnetic field's forces on the bent tubes generated and some alternative solution materials were proposed.

Bachelor Of Engineering - Be, Mechanical Engineering

Master'S Degree, Mechanical Engineering

Graduate Research Assistant