• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.1931-1938
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• 2021

Uranium ingot is produced by metallothermic reduction of uranium tetrafluoride using magnesium or calcium as reductant. Presence of oxygen containing compounds viz. uranyl fluoride and uranium oxide in the starting uranium fluoride has a significant effect on the firing time, final temperature of the charge, slag-metal separation and hence the metal recovery. As reported in the literature, the maximum tolerable limit for uranyl fluoride in the UF₄ is 2.5 wt% and limit for uranium oxide content is in the range 2-3 wt%. No theoretical or experimental basis is available till date for these limits. Analyses have been carried out in this study to understand the effect of UO₂F₂ concentration in the starting fluoride on the final temperature of the products and thus the reduction characteristics. UF₄ having uranyl fluoride concentration, less than as well as more than 2.5 wt%, have been investigated. Thermodynamic calculations have been carried out to arrive at a general expression for the final temperature attained by the products during calciothermic reduction of UF₄. Finally, an upper limit for the oxygen containing impurities has been estimated using the CaO-CaF₂ phase diagram.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.1610-1615
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• 2019

Positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance (MR) scanning has the advantage of less additional exposure to radiation than does PET/computed tomography (CT). In particular, MR based attenuation correction (MR AC) can greatly affect the image quality of PET and is frequently obtained using various MR sequences. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to quantitatively compare the image quality between MR non-AC (MR NAC) and MR AC in PET images with three MR sequences. Percent image uniformity (PIU), percent contrast recovery (PCR), and percent background variability (PBV) were estimated to evaluate the quality of PET images with MR AC. Based on the results of PIU, 15.2% increase in the average quality was observed for PET images with MR AC than for PET images with MR NAC. In addition, 28.6% and 71.1% improvement in the average results of PCR and PBV respectively, was observed for PET images with MR AC compared with that with MR NAC. Moreover, no significant difference was observed among the average values using three MR sequences. In conclusion, the current study demonstrated that PET with MR AC improved the image quality and can be help diagnosis in all MR sequence cases.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.911-919
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• 2021

In this paper, the design stress intensity values for the plate-type fuel assembly for research reactor are presented. Through a tensile test, the material properties of the cladding (aluminum alloy 6061) and structural material (aluminum alloy 6061-T6), in this case the yield and ultimate tensile strengths, Young's modulus and the elongation, are measured with the temperatures. The empirical equations of the material properties with respect to the temperature are presented. The cladding undergoes several heat treatments and hardening processes during the fabrication process. Cladding strengths are reduced compared to those of the raw material during annealing. Up to a temperature of 150 ℃, the strengths of the cladding do not significantly decrease due to the dislocations generated from the cold work. However, over 150 ℃, the mechanical strengths begin to decrease, mainly due to recrystallization, dislocation recovery and precipitate growth. Taking into account the uncertainty of the 95% probability and 95% confidence level, the design stress intensities of the cladding and structural materials are established. The presented design stress intensity values become the basis of the stress design criteria for a safety analysis of plate-type fuels.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.35-44
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• 2021

Purpose: To presenting basic data for the spatial composition required when planning the future department of rehabilitation medicine by analyzing the spatial composition of the location, size, area, and plan type of the rehabilitation department of the Regional Public Hospital. Methods: 3 Methods have been used in this paper. 1) Analyzing drawings to derive the net floor area of each room. 2) A literature survey about rehabilitation healthcare system. 3) Observation survey for user circulation analysis. Results: 1) Rehabilitation is an overall process of treatment that helps to play a role as an individual in society, away from the perspective of treating physical damage. The Department of Rehabilitation Medicine of the local medical center must provide rehabilitation medical services corresponding to the recovery and maintenance period for community rehabilitation. 2) The Department of Rehabilitation Medicine can be classified into diagnostics area, examination area, treatment area, management area, and interface area based on the rehabilitation treatment process. Implication: It can be used as basic data when planning related facilities by analyzing the characteristics of the space plan of the required room according to the relationship between activities, movement lines, and operation plans based on user behavior.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.266-272
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• 2021

In the pulsed electron beam generators, such as plasma focus devices and linear induction accelerators whose electron pulse width is in the range of nanosecond and less, as well as in cases where there is no direct access to electron beam, like runaway electrons in Tokamaks, measurement of the electron energy spectrum is a technical challenge. In such cases, the indirect measurement of the electron spectrum by using the bremsstrahlung radiation spectrum associated with it, is an appropriate solution. The problem with this method is that the matrix equation between the two spectrums is an ill-conditioned equation, which results in errors of the measured X-ray spectrum to be propagated with a large coefficient in the estimated electron spectrum. In this study, a method based on the neural network and the MCNP code is presented and evaluated to recover the electron spectrum from the X-ray generated by collision of the electron beam with a target. Multilayer perceptron network showed good accuracy in electron spectrum recovery, so that for the X-ray spectrum with errors of 3% and 10%, the network estimated the electron spectrum with an average standard error of 8% and 11%, on all of the energy intervals.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.1597-1605
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• 2022

A porous silica-based adsorbent was prepared by impregnating the pores of a silica support with the extractant 1,3-[(2,4-diethylheptylethoxy)oxy]-2,4-crown-6-calix[4]arene (Calix[4]arene-R14) and an additive agent 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide (C₂mim ⁺ NTf^-₂) as the materials to remove cesium(I) (Cs⁺) ions from seawater. The as-prepared adsorbent showed excellent adsorption performance toward Cs⁺ ions, with adsorption equilibrium reached within 2 h and an adsorption amount of 0.196 mmol/g observed. The solution pH, temperature, and the presence of coexisting metal ions were found to have almost no effect on Cs⁺ adsorption. The adsorption mechanism was considered to proceed via ion exchange between Cs⁺ and C₂mim⁺. In addition, the particle-induced X-ray emission analysis results further clarified that the adsorbed Cs⁺ ion species on the adsorbent was in the form of both CsCl and CsBr.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.991-996
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• 2022

Microstructures of monolithic high purity SiC and SiC with sintering additives after neutron irradiation to a fluence of 2.0-2.5 × 10²⁴ n/m² (E > 0.1 MeV) at 333-363 K and after post-irradiation annealing up to 1673 K were observed using a transmission electron microscopy. Results showed that no black spot defects or dislocation loops in SiC grains were found after the neutron irradiation for all of the specimens owing to the moderate fluence at low irradiation temperature. Thus, it is confirmed that these specimens were swelled mostly by the formation of point defects. Black spots and small dislocation loops were discovered only after the annealing process in PureBeta-SiC and CVD-SiC, where the swelling almost diminished. Anomalous-shaped YAG grains were found in SiC ceramics containing sintering additives. These grains contained dense black spots defects and might lose crystallinity after the neutron irradiation, while these defects may annihilate by recrystallization during annealing up to 1673 K. Amorphous grain boundary phase was also presented in this ceramic, and a large part of it was crystallized through post-irradiation annealing and could affect their recovery behavior.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.1560-1569
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• 2022

Liquid fueled molten salt reactors (MSRs) have seen renewed interest because of their inherent safety features, higher thermal efficiency and potential for efficient thorium utilisation for power generation. Thorium fluoride is one of the salts used in liquid fueled MSRs employing Th-U cycle. In the present study, ThF₄ was prepared by hydro-fluorination of ThO₂ using anhydrous HF gas. Process parameters viz. bed depth, hydrofluorination time and hydrofluorination temperature, were optimized for the preparation of ThF₄ in a static bed reactor setup. The products were characterized with X-Ray diffraction and experimental conditions for complete conversion to ThF₄ were established which also corroborated with the yield values. Hydrofluorination of ThO₂ at 450 ℃ for half an hour at a bed depth of 6 mm gave the best result, with a yield of about 99.36% ThF₄. No unconverted oxide or any other impurity was observed. Rietveld refinement was performed on the XRD data of this ThF₄, and Chi2 value of 3.54 indicated good agreement between observed and calculated profiles.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.12
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• pp.4014-4021
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• 2021

If safety injection systems (SISs) do not work in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), the accident can progress to a severe accident in which the reactor core is exposed and the reactor vessel fails. Therefore, it is considered that a technology that provides recoverable maximum time for SIS actuation is necessary to prevent this progression. In this study, the corresponding time was defined as the golden time. To achieve the objective of accurately predicting the golden time, the prediction was performed using the deep fuzzy neural network (DFNN) with rule-dropout. The DFNN with rule-dropout has an architecture in which many of the fuzzy neural networks (FNNs) are connected and is a method in which the fuzzy rule numbers, which are directly related to the number of nodes in the FNN that affect inference performance, are properly adjusted by a genetic algorithm. The golden time prediction performance of the DFNN model with rule-dropout was better than that of the support vector regression model. By using the prediction result through the proposed DFNN with rule-dropout, it is expected to prevent the aggravation of the accidents by providing the maximum remaining time for SIS recovery, which failed in the LOCA situation.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.10
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• pp.3700-3708
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• 2023

The stochastic origin ensembles method with resolution recovery (SOE-RR) has been proposed to reconstruct proton-induced prompt gammas (PGs), and the reconstructed PG image was used for range verification. However, due to low detection efficiency, the number of valid events is low. Such a low-count condition can degrade the accuracy of the SOE-RR method for proton range verification. In this study, we proposed two strategies to improve the reconstruction of the SOE-RR algorithm for low-count PG imaging. We also studied the number of iterations and repetitions required to achieve reliable range verification. We simulated a proton beam (10⁸ protons) irradiated on a water phantom and used a two-layer Compton camera to detect 4.44-MeV PGs. Our simulated results show that combining the SOE-RR algorithm with restricted volume (SOE-RR-RV) can reduce the error of the estimation of the Bragg peak position from 5.0 mm to 2.5 mm. We also found that the SOE-RR-RV algorithm initialized using a back-projection image could improve the convergence rate while maintaining accurate range verification. Finally, we observed that the improved SOE-RR algorithm set for 60,000 iterations and 25 repetitions could provide reliable PG images. Based on the proposed reconstruction strategies, the SOE-RR algorithm has the potential to achieve a positioning error of 2.5 mm for low-count PG imaging.