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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Sarah Miele, Pranav Karve, Sankaran Mahadevan (Vanderbilt Univ), Vivek Agarwal (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 976-982
In this work, we investigate the suitability of a novel dynamics-based method, namely vibroacoustic modulation (VAM), for the detection and localization of cracks caused by the alkali-silica reaction (ASR). ASR is a chemical reaction between the cement and certain aggregates containing amorphous silica. In a VAM test, the structural component is excited using two frequencies. The frequency modulation (and hence the nonlinear structural behavior) appears as sidebands around the higher (probing) frequency in the linear spectrum (LS) of the measured response in the neighborhood of the damage zone. A map of the magnitude of such sidebands can be used to detect and localize the damage [1]. We perform laboratory experiments to investigate VAM-based damage diagnosis in thick concrete components. We describe laboratory testing on a cement slab containing four pockets of reactive aggregates placed at known locations. Our experiments show that VAMbased testing with optimized test parameters and suitable sensor density can potentially be used to detect and localize cracks in thick concrete structures.