Purdue NE senior design team named national finalist in ANS student design competition

Purdue Nuclear Engineering continues to demonstrate the strength of its undergraduate design curriculum on the national stage. One of Purdue’s eight senior design capstone teams competing in the 2025 American Nuclear Society Student Design Competition has been selected as a national finalist and will present at the ANS Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C., this November.

Team NRC – “Design and Application of a Machine Learning System for Predictive Emergency Response” earned the finalist slot.  Sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the team includes Jack Jackson, Qi Heng Law, Vishwas Raja Mukundan Krishnaswamy, and Halen Munday.  

The finalist project developed a thermal-hydraulics-informed machine learning tool that can classify whether a short-term station blackout in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) will result in radiological release and estimate time-to-release when applicable. The integrated model achieved perfect classification between release and no-release cases and demonstrated high fidelity in forecasting failure time, enabling more informed and timely protective-action decisions. 

“We are proud of the stellar performance of our senior design teams in the prestigious ANS competition,” said Hitesh Bindra, NE associate professor, undergraduate program chair, and faculty advisor. “Reflecting the best in real-world problem solving, their achievements demonstrate Purdue NE’s preeminence in workforce development and research impact.”