Kadir Sener

Dr. Kadir Sener is an Assistant Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at Auburn University since August 2019. Dr. Sener has been actively involved in numerous research projects pertaining to nuclear structural engineering that were funded by both public and private agencies. Prior to joining Auburn Univ., he devoted much of his time into research on testing, analysis, and development of design specifications for steel-plate concrete composite structures for use in Gen III+ nuclear power plants such as WEC's AP1000 and MHI's US-APWR. He subsequently was the lead research engineer in a project funded by the US-DOE to investigate the in-plane and out-of-plane shear behavior of both steel-plate concrete (SC) and reinforced concrete (RC) structures. These projects involved large-scale experimental investigations and advanced computational studies of SC and RC structures to understand their fundamental behavior under extreme loading conditions such as seismic events that involved operational and accidental thermal conditions. The outcomes of these research projects have been incorporated into the code specification that governs the design and construction of steel-concrete composite structures for safety-related nuclear facilities and used extensively around the world by engineers, consultants, and regulators. Dr. Sener also briefly participated in a research project funded by the US-DOE through the ARPA-E program where the project focused on investigating different concrete technologies for deployment in stable salt reactors. His current research interests include investigating topics that will enable the widespread implementation of next generation nuclear power plants and small modular reactors including seismic, thermal, and soil-structure-interaction behavior.