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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Raymond S. Troy, Robert V. Tompson, Tushar K. Ghosh, Sudarshan K. Loyalka, Nidia C. Gallego
Nuclear Technology | Volume 189 | Number 3 | March 2015 | Pages 241-257
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-25
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Characterization of graphite particles (dust) produced by abrasion that would occur in a pebble bed reactor is of interest for reasons of safety, operation, and maintenance. To better understand this abrasion and particle generation, we have built a test apparatus to produce particles by sliding abrasion in a 1% to 5% relative humidity air environment. We have used a commercial-grade graphite in our experiments and have generated size distributions for the abraded particles. We have also fit lognormal functions to those size distributions (for use in computer codes); determined particle shapes; measured temperature and humidity during the tests; measured and calculated wear rates; and measured the surface roughness of both pretest and posttest samples, particle surface areas, pore volumes, and pore volume distributions of particles produced during abrasion of graphite surfaces under different loadings and sliding speeds. The experiments showed that as loading (analogous to pebble depth in the reactor) and sliding speed increase, so do the wear rates and numbers of particles produced, while surface roughness decreases, increases, and then decreases. Brunauer-Emmett-Teller measurements show that abrasion increases surface area from 0.583 m2/g in the bulk material to 555 m2/g in material abraded at high loading and high sliding speed. Wear rates range from 0.005 to 0.991 g/m per contact site. The size of the particles observed was <4000 nm. In all, our research shows that pebble abrasion is a complex process that is not constant during operation and thus should be considered for future work.