Engineering Commons^™

Monitoring And Prognosis Of Plant Components, Jeffrey Banks

Masters Theses

Many predictive maintenance approaches focus primarily on fault monitoring and diagnosis of rotating machinery. Today's industrial "reliability-based" maintenance programs implement vibrational analysis techniques as a sound foundation in minimizing unnecessary machine downtime. These approaches, based upon on-line data acquisitions and analysis may be used to increase component availability and ultimately forecast remaining life. Depending upon the specific type of machinery under consideration, measurements such as temperature, voltage, current, rotational speed, power, and torque may be analyzed to enhance machinery diagnostics capability.

The purpose of the proposed research is to formulate and implement a methodology to estimate the remaining useful life …

Thermalhydraulics Analysis Of The Unit-Cell Nuclear Light Bulb Rocket Engine, Vojislav Banjac

Nuclear Engineering ETDs

This dissertation presents a detailed thermalhydraulics analysis of the unit-cell derivative of the Nuclear Light Bulb (NLB) rocket engine. The NLB engine is a gas core nuclear rocket first proposed in the 1960's by the then-United Aircraft Research Laboratories (UARL); its unit-cell derivative consists of a low-temperature moderator/reflector as well as segmented propellant channels, both proposed with the intent of increasing the k_eff of the system.

The results of this work can be grouped into two major areas: (1) thermal and neutronics analysis of the engine, and (2) investigation of the feasibility of the engine over a wide range …

Calculations Of The Interactions Of Energetic Ions With Materials For Protection Of Computer Memory And Biological Systems, Myung-Hee Y. Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Theoretical calculations were performed for the propagation and interactions of particles having high atomic numbers and energy through diverse shield materials including polymeric materials and epoxy-bound lunar regolith by using transport codes for laboratory ion beams and the cosmic ray spectrum. Heavy ions fragment and lose energy upon interactions with shielding materials of specified elemental composition, density, and thickness. A fragmenting heavy iron ion produces hundreds of isotopes during nuclear reactions, which are treated in the solution of the transport problem used here. A reduced set of 80 isotopes is sufficient to represent the charge distribution, but a minimum of …

Effects Of Specimen Size Reduction On The Transition Curve Of The Charpy V-Notch Impact Test, Lonnie Eugene Schubert

Masters Theses

"This study was undertaken to correlate the impact properties of ASTM standard full size Charpy V-notch impact specimens to the impact properties of subsize specimens. An ASTM A533-B quenched and tempered plate steel was examined. The fine grained martensitic material had a coarse prior austenite grain size, which resulted in a low upper shelf energy for this material. Three sizes of specimens were included. Specimens were irradiated in the TRIGA Reactor Facility operated by the U. S. Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado, to 1 x 10¹⁹ n/cm² (E > 1 MeV) at 150°C (302°F). Unirradiated and irradiated specimens were …