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Acoustic Resonance Testing (ART) is a nondestructive test that uses the vibrational characteristics of an object to find defects. It is a whole-part test, so measurements taken in one place can indicate defects anywhere. It can be done quickly and requires minimal equipment. ART can be completely automated and make objective, quantitative judgments, eliminating human error. ART uses the fact that...
Power Fingerprinting (PFP) provides an innovative, powerful integrity assessment tool that is particularly well suited for critical embedded systems, including resource-constrained and legacy platforms such as those still being used by energy providers. One of the main applications of PFP is cyber security monitoring of critical systems and the detection of malicious intrusions, tampering, and attacks...
To be able to evolve fuel and structural microstructure within a nuclear power reactor in an engineered manner, an effective extreme environment sensor must exist. The development of sensor technology for nondestructive and nonintrusive measurements in harsh environments is a very active field. However most of the effort has been in adapting existing sensing technology to meet the harsh environmental...
Extreme environments such as helium circulators (Next Generation Nuclear Plant) and sodium and liquid salt pumps (Advanced Reactor Concepts and Small Modular Reactor programs) include high temperatures (700+ degrees Celsius), material compatibility challenges, requirements to reduce maintenance associated with lubricated and moving parts, pump seals, and material degradation. These environments require...
There is growing interest in longer-term operation of the current US nuclear power plant (NPP) fleet. This paper presents an overview of prognostic health management (PHM) technologies that could play a role in the safe and effective operation of nuclear power plants during extended life. A case study in prognostics for materials degradation assessment, using laboratory-scale measurements, is briefly...
ORNL recently applied its “learning-from-signals” (LFS) techniques to evaluating and improving the energy efficiency of buildings at military installations. LFS is a term coined by ORNL to describe the machine learning algorithms that it has developed for mining, processing, and classifying signals either purposefully or inadvertently being picked up from infrastructure or individual devices. For...
As the complexity of power plants increase, so does the difficulty in accurately modeling the interactions among the subsystems. Distributed sensing and control offers a possible solution to this problem, but introduces a new one: how to ensure that each subsystem satisfying its control objective leads to the safe and reliable operation of the entire power plant. In this work we present a distributed...
Currently in the United States, periodic sensor recalibration is required for all safety-related sensors, typically occurring at every refueling outage; and it has emerged as a critical path item for shortening outage duration in some plants. International application of calibration monitoring has shown that sensors may operate for longer periods within calibration tolerances. This issue is expected...
The promises of smart grid for the average consumer will require both voluntary, non-technical changes in their consumption behavior, or that and the installation of some technology in their home that enables their desire to participate to be enacted on their behalf. For the latter case, the reality of a retail friendly experience is not yet realized. There are challenges beyond what for many is a...
This paper discusses new types of sensors and data management approaches that can be applied to operate and manage the grid more efficiently and flexibly while maintaining reliability. Sensors can help increase awareness of asset condition and grid conditions for more optimum management of the grid. Integration of sensors with system models to predict conditions on the grid can further improve the...
Accurately measuring the location of facial features is an important step in many face recognition algorithms. Every face is unique which means localization needs to be tolerant of differences between individual subjects. Additionally, changing illumination, poor focus, and deformation due to expression changes complicate the problem. This paper introduces a method for locating facial features that...
Aging plants and reduced workforces are causing commercial nuclear power reactors to limit the extent of their predictive maintenance programs to only critical to safety and critical to operation systems. Some sites are even forced into living with a reactive maintenance strategy for all but the most critical systems. This typically leads to significant expense through costly downtime and component...
The Liquids Reflectometer (LR) Instrument installed at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) enables observations of chemical kinetics, solid-state reactions, phase-transitions and chemical reactions in general [1]. The ability of the instrument to complete measurements quickly and therefore process many samples is a key capability inherent in the system design [2]. Alignment and sample environment...
In general, the world's nuclear power fleet is comprised of facilities that were built on designs created nearly a half century ago. There are numerous instances of original vintage equipment still installed and operating in these plants. This absence of modernization is due to many factors including the reliability of the existing equipment, lack of confidence and operating experience of digital...
State awareness for a control system is the accurate knowledge of the internal states of the system realization. By definition, a cyber-attacker decreases the state awareness by modifying or removing the information available to the operator and control system. By decreasing state awareness, the attacker can directly cause damage to the physical system through the control system, or indirectly by...
This paper discusses the architecture of the advanced metering and communication test bed installed on the ORNL (Oak Ridge National laboratory) distribution grid. The test bed is being exploited for many applications that serve the reliability of the grid, such as standard validation and implementation of the new encryption devices to improve cyber security.
This paper addresses the communication and energy efficiency in collaborative visual sensor networks (VSNs) for people localization, a challenging computer vision problem of its own. We focus on the design of a light-weight and energy-efficient solution where people are localized based on distributed camera nodes integrating the so-called certainty map generated at each node, that records the target...
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