Dr Pallippattu Krishnan Vijayan is currently working as a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and his research focuses on natural circulation based passive safety systems for advanced reactors. Dr Vijayan, a chemical engineer from the University of Calicut joined BARC after completing the training course in nuclear science engineering conducted by BARC. He received his PhD from the Department of Energy Systems Engineering, IIT Bombay in 1989. A Distinguished Scientist, Dr Vijayan served at BARC in various positions such as group leader, head, thermal hydraulics section, head reactor engineering division and Director, Reactor Design and Development Group. He has worked nearly four decades in the field of thermal hydraulics of nuclear reactors and his specific field of expertise is natural circulation based passive safety systems. He played a key role in the thermal hydraulic design of thorium based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) and established large scale integral test facilities for its thermal hydraulic design validation. He participated in several International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) coordinated research projects and bilateral research projects like Indo-Italian, Indo-German, Indo-UK, Indo-Korea and AERB-US NRC. He was one of the experts invited by IAEA to formulate a training course on 'Natural circulation phenomena and passive safety systems for advanced water cooled reactors' and is a lecturer for this IAEA training course since 2004.
