Written by on Wednesday August 1st 2012 in Press Releases

UK Nuclear Graduate of the Year saves £12m with SIMUL8

We think it’s time to share another SIMUL8 success story. Yet, this is no ordinary story, it involves a UK Nuclear Graduate of the Year, Aujas Mistry, and a cost saving of £12 million.

Let’s start at the beginning and give you some background to help set the scene:

Aujas Mistry, also known as OJ, is an enthusiastic, committed and passionate Mechanical Engineer, who has a keen interest in nuclear power. After speaking to him it’s easy to see how his drive led him to win the UK Nuclear Graduate of the Year award. His current achievements span over the last three years and include the designing, validating and running of an operations requirements model with SIMUL8 simulation software, to help identify savings of £12 million.

This was completed under the title of Process Engineer –a position he held before being promoted to Package Engineer – working for an AMEC consortium company in nuclear decommissioning; specifically on a waste encapsulation plant project.

During his time on the waste encapsulation project, Aujas proactively drove the construction, validation and processing of the resource simulation model mentioned. The model was developed to help identify the optimal design of the encapsulation plant at the nuclear facility. This was initially done by simulating in detail the processes of other facilities on site, including the waste retrieval facilities, the long term waste store and the transport vehicles.

The model was then further developed incorporating the detailed process of the encapsulation plant. Once the processes were completed, key parameters were made variable to optimize the design of the encapsulation plant. It was during the course of running and analyzing differing scenarios Aujas was able to deliver a report and present the findings to senior project leads and personnel. It was through this work that these massive savings were made at the Trawsfynydd site and his recommended alternate proposal is being designed and constructed on site.

The success and high profile of the analysis soon led to Aujas being offered a place on the waste retrieval project as package engineer. More recently Aujas has moved on from AMEC and now works at Nuvia where he is working on supporting the UKs nuclear new builds developments.

It gets better, Aujas is not only the UK Nuclear Graduate of the Year, but he also recently won the Young Mechanical Engineer of the Year Award issued by the IMechE. This award recognizes a young mechanical engineer who has made an excellent contribution through community involvement and set a good example working towards the vision of ‘improving the world through engineering’.

His volunteer work hosting career awareness days and promoting science and engineering in schools, along with his professional achievements are both highly admirable, and it probably didn’t come as a surprise to those who know Aujas when he was awarded for his efforts as a young engineer.

Of course there were challenges faced along the way, like the sheer level of work to get through and deliver, but I think it’s safe to say it helped Aujas learn how to prioritize and even in some cases delegate work to others to ensure a successful delivery.

Challenges aside, it’s through his efforts, achievements and passion for promoting the opportunities that the nuclear industry has to offer, that Aujas has been able to achieve a great deal both professionally and socially.