Prof. em. Dr. Horst-Michael Prasser

From April 2006 to January 2021, Horst-Michael Prasser was full professor for nuclear energy systems at ETH Zurich.

Horst-Michael Prasser has been full professor of Nuclear Energy Systems at ETH Zurich from April 2006 to January 2021. From 2007 to 2017, he was also head of the Laboratory for Thermal-Hydraulics at the Paul Scherrer Institute. From 2008 to 2011, he was elected as a member of the supervisory body of the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI Council).

Professor Prasser was born in Görlitz, Germany in 1955. He studied at the Moscow Energy Institute from 1974 to 1980 and received his doctorate in 1984 from the Zittau University of Applied Sciences on the topic of flow studies in nuclear reactors. In early 1987, he started working for the Central Institute for Nuclear Research Rossendorf near Dresden. During the German reunification phase, he also served as a personal advisor to the scientific director during the founding of the Rossendorf Research Center. From 1994, there Prof. Prasser headed the Accident Analysis and Experimental Thermal Fluid Dynamics departments at the Institute for Safety Research. From earlier work at the Rossendorf Research Center (today Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) came results related to boron mixing in pressurized water reactors which made direct contributions to reactor safety. This was in addition to development of high-resolution measurement techniques used for liquid-gas flows, including wire mesh sensors and time-resolved gamma and X-ray tomography. Large scale thermal-hydraulic test facilities were constructed where these techniques were applied.

At ETH Zurich, Prof. Prasser continued working primarily in the field of thermal fluid dynamics in the context of nuclear facilities. Further innovative measurement methods for various applications emerged, such as high speed measurement of liquid film thickness distributions, using either conductivity probes or the attenuation of infrared radiation. Under his leadership, the Paul Scherrer Institute developed a deuterium-deuterium plasma neutron source that is suitable for fast neutron imaging. The laboratory of Prof. Prasser provided contributions to the development of CFD codes used to describe single and two-phase flow phenomena in fuel elements of nuclear reactors, while also providing experimental results for the validation of such models. One focus was on the detailed description of liquid films in modern fuel assemblies of boiling water reactors. Other fields of activity were in the area of containment thermal-hydraulics, e.g. work on the distribution of hydrogen in severe accident scenarios and filtered containment pressure relief.

Prof. Prasser played a key role in establishing the “Nuclear Engineering” master's degree, which has been offered jointly with EPF Lausanne since 2008.