Engineering Commons^™

Structural Health Monitoring Of Pipelines In Radioactive Environments Through Acoustic Sensing And Machine Learning, Michael Thompson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Structural health monitoring (SHM) comprises multiple methodologies for the detection and characterization of stress, damage, and aberrations in engineering structures and equipment. Although, standard commercial engineering operations may freely adopt new technology into everyday operations, the nuclear industry is slowed down by tight governmental regulations and extremely harsh environments. This work aims to investigate and evaluate different sensor systems for real-time structural health monitoring of piping systems and develop a novel machine learning model to detect anomalies from the sensor data. The novelty of the current work lies in the development of an LSTM-autoencoder neural network to automate anomaly detection …

Mechanical Properties Of Permanent Foaming Fixatives For Deactivation & Decommissioning Activities, Tristan Maximilian Simoes-Ponce

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Energy is investigating fixative technologies that encapsulate and/or immobilize residual contamination in voids during deactivation and decommissioning (D&D). These technologies must have adequate mechanical and adhesion properties to withstand seismic activity that may occur. One solution is the implementation of polyurethane foams used as permanent foaming fixatives (PFF), specifically intumescent foams that contain expandable graphite, making them fire resistant when exposed to extreme heat conditions.

Tensile, compression, seismic, and tensile adhesion testing was done on six commercial-off-the-self polyurethane foams to determine if the expandable graphite and other filler intumescent technologies improve its mechanical limits. It was found …