About

Caleb Brooks is a professor and Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with the Grainger College of Engineering. He serves as the Director of the Illinois Nuclear Power Institute and holds a courtesy appointment as a WPI Professor at Kyushu University’s International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research. Brooks earned his Ph.D. and B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University in 2014 and 2008, respectively. His research areas include advanced reactor designs, reactor physics, reactor thermal-hydraulics, and two-phase flow and heat transfer. Brooks has contributed to the understanding of nuclear microreactors, energy systems with nuclear reactor coupling, and transient local two-phase flow data analysis. His work involves modeling and simulation of nuclear reactor behavior, interfacial area transport, and the development of computational methods for nuclear energy applications. Brooks has published extensively in journals such as Nuclear Technology, Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Applied Thermal Engineering, among others.

Research topics

• Physics
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mechanics
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Demography
• Thermodynamics
• Public economics
• Materials science
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Obtaining Transient Local Two-Phase Flow Data from Periodic Oscillations and Its Uncertainty Quantification

  Nuclear Technology · 2026-05-05

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Nuclear for net zero campuses

  Elsevier eBooks · 2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Modified Conductivity Probe Design for Two-Phase Flow Measurement in Very Narrow Channels

  Nuclear Technology · 2026-02-10

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reconstruct In-Core Neutron Flux Distribution Using Ex-Core Detectors

  2025-01-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Advanced Nuclear Reactor Driven Direct Air Capture for Achieving Net-Negative Emissions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Validation and application of a coupled xenon-transport and reactor dynamic model of Molten-salt reactor experiment

  Nuclear Science and Techniques · 2025-04-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Coupling and economic analysis of nuclear microreactor enabled ammonia production

  Progress in Nuclear Energy · 2025-10-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Assessment of ASYST and RELAP5 for predicting stability and limit cycles of a low-pressure natural circulation loop with flashing instability

  Applied Thermal Engineering · 2024-09-21 · 4 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Microreactor Requirements for High-Performance Computing

  Nuclear Technology · 2024-02-23 · 4 citations

  articleCorresponding

  The potential deployment of microreactors as a zero-emission source for critical applications within integrated energy systems such as microgrids has been gaining interest in recent years owing to the microreactors' dispatchable nature, modular design, small site footprint, and carbon-free generation. A particularly high-value but challenging application with rapidly growing demand is in the deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters within microgrids. In this work, a model of a HPC cluster in an energy-diverse microgrid is developed to determine the requirements of a technology-agnostic microreactor deployed for such a challenging application. The minute-resolution simulations revealed that the cluster's electrical load fluctuation of up to 4.1 MW/min required a fast and responsive load-following capability. When the load-following capability of the microreactor was perturbed, the required microgrid storage capacity associated with having a 0.1 MW/min dispatchable microreactor decreased by two orders of magnitude as compared with load-following solely by energy storage devices, indicating that load-following capability in microreactors is of great value in such applications. The analysis methods described in this work can be extended to other microgrids, other HPC clusters, or other types of challenging applications, and can help microgrid planners in determining the storage size, output capacity, and ramping capabilities of the storage devices required for a given microgrid configuration.

  PublisherDOI

• Validation of two-group interfacial area transport equation in boiling flow

  International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer · 2024-04-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The Two-Fluid Model is the backbone of thermal-hydraulics and system-analysis codes for nuclear design. The Two-Fluid Model tracks the transfer of conserved quantities—mass, momentum, and energy—without the need for bubble interface tracking. However, two-phase flows are characterized by their different flow regimes which change as more vapor is present in the flow, from bubbly flow to cap/slug flow to annular flow. The two-group Two-Fluid Model can track the progression of boiling flows beyond the bubbly region without the need for flow-regime maps. A two-group wall-boiling model is implemented and coupled with the two-group Interfacial Area Transport Equation. The resulting model is compared against experimental data and predicts the growth in cap/slug bubbles through interaction models rather than through flow-regime maps. The coupled model can predict the growth in void fraction and interfacial area concentration beyond the capability of the one-group model, demonstrating the applicability of a coupled two-group approach to modeling boiling flow.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zhiee Jhia Ooi

  Argonne National Laboratory

  23 shared

• Takashi Hibiki

  22 shared

• Joseph L. Bottini

  United States Military Academy

  20 shared

• Longxiang Zhu

  17 shared

• Vineet Kumar

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  17 shared

• Taiyang Zhang

  15 shared

• Yang Liu

  Kunming University of Science and Technology

  10 shared

• Mamoru Ishii

  National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

  9 shared

Labs

• Illinois Nuclear Power InstitutePI

Awards & honors

• Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar (2024)
• WPI Professor, International Institute for Carbon-Neutral En…