Nuclear Engineering Commons^™

Design Concepts And Process Analysis For Transmuter Fuel Manufacturing: Quarterly Progress Report #6, Kamalakar Alluri, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

Project Milestones

• Completed a systematic study seeking to arrive at an optimized plant configuration, using value engineering techniques in January 2006.

• Vision-based robot serving and automated plant safety monitoring is currently in progress.

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication: Quarterly Progress Report #11, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

The eleventh quarter of the project covered the following:

• Mr. Richard Silva successfully defended his thesis in April 2004 and graduated from the MEG Master’s program.

• Further refinements on Concepts and Methods for Vision-Based Hot Cell Supervision and control, focusing on rule-based object recognition (Ph.D. Graduate Jae-Kyu Lee). Ms. Caroline Wiejak, an exchange student from the ESIEE in Marne-la-Vallee, France is continuing with the image analysis effort. To date, she has transferred Jae-Kyu’s code to Matlab, and is presently expanding its application to more complex 3D shapes.

• Graduate student Jamil Renno refined and detailed his simulations of …

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication: Quarterly Progress Report #7, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

The seventh quarter of the project covered the following:

• Mr. Richard Silva continued the development of a simulation model with a Waelischmiller hot cell robot. Rich will continue to develop detailed 3-D process simulation models as his M.Sc. thesis project.

• Mr. Richard Silva presented a paper on hot cell robotics at the ANS student conference in Berkeley, CA.

• Concepts and Methods for Vision-Based Hot Cell Supervision and control, focusing on rule-based object recognition (Ph.D. Student Jae-Kyu Lee)

• Undergraduate student Jamil Renno, developed better control algorithms, and created simulations of pick and place actions for the hot …

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication: Quarterly Progress Report #6, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

The sixth quarter of the project covered the following:

• Mr. Richard Silva continued the development of a simulation model with a Waelischmiller hot cell robot. Rich will continue to develop detailed 3-D process simulation models as his M.Sc. thesis project. Rich is employed with Bechtel at the Yucca Mountain project.

• Concepts and Methods for Vision-Based Hot Cell Supervision and control (Ph.D. Student Jae-Kyu Lee )

• An undergraduate senior student in mechanical engineering, Mr. Jamil Renno, was hired to develop the simulation model for the hot cell manipulator.

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication: Year 1 Final Report, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

The project objective is the design and evaluation of manufacturing processes for transmuter fuel fabrication. The large-scale deployment of remote fabrication and refabrication processes will be required for all transmutation scenarios. Current program emphasis is on a five-year effort to determine the feasibility of transmutation as a technology to limit the need for repository storage of spent commercial fuel. The evaluation of the fabrication processes will create a decision support data base to document design, operations, and costs. Fabrication processes required for different fuel types differ in terms of equipment types, throughput, and cost. The year 1 project was focused …

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

One of the primary concerns in selecting a fuel matrix for actinide-bearing fuels, such as those for transmutation systems, is fuel fabrication. Fuel fabrication technologies for the fabrication and re-fabrication processes must meet several technical considerations, such as minimizing secondary radioactive waste streams, economic viability, reasonable capital outlay, and must be easy to maintain over the transmuter core life cycle. Additionally, the fuel type chosen must be easily manufactured in a remote environment. The volatile behavior of americium during thermal processing further complicates these goals. Currently, the national program is investigating a number of candidate fuel matrices: metallic, ceramic, dispersion, …