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Jefferson Lab awarded $8M for accelerator technology to enable transmutation
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is leading research supported by two Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) grants aimed at developing accelerator technology to enable nuclear waste recycling, decreasing the half-life of spent nuclear fuel.
Both grants, totaling $8.17 million in combined funding, were awarded through the Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now (NEWTON) program, which aims to enable the transmutation of nuclear fuels by funding novel technologies for improving the performance of particle generation systems.
Hang Xiao, Alex Hines, Fan Zhang, Jamie B. Coble, J. Wes Hines
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 3 | March 2023 | Pages 419-436
Technical Paper—Instrumentation and Controls | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2073949
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Industrial components and systems undergo degradation in process operations. Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a process to assess and predict health conditions of components and can be applied to condition-based monitoring and maintenance. PHM is commonly utilized to analyze the health condition of a single lifecycle until failure. When maintenance occurs, degradation can be removed, and the PHM model can be restarted with new parameters related to the expected postmaintenance conditions. Maintenance actions, mostly imperfect repairs, may not entirely reset the condition to as good as new, and further degradation may occur at a higher rate. Maintenance repairs should be considered in prognostic models to predict component health more accurately.
Furthermore, processes typically have more than one component that degrade and influence process measurements. The dependence of process measurements to multiple fault modes and related degradation can make individual component health monitoring complex. Commonly, faults and their related effects on process parameters must be isolated. In these cases, the diagnostics and prognostics framework should handle unsynchronized failure and maintenance reinitialization of different components for multiple fault processes. This research paper presents the Maintenance-Dependent Monitoring and Prognostics Model (MDMPM) to detect anomalies, decouple faults for different components, and predict future health conditions to calculate remaining useful life (RUL). The model is demonstrated with semisimulated nuclear power plant (NPP) data, with simultaneous condenser pump degradation and condenser tube fouling. The MDMPM shows a reliable prediction of RULs of NPP maintenance-dependent processes with interacting component degradation modes.