• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권5호
• /
• pp.1885-1891
• /
• 2023

The present work aims to fabricate Na_1+xZr₂Si_xP_3-xO₁₂ compound at various calcination temperatures based on the zircon mineral. The fabricated compound was calcinated at 250, 500, and 1000℃. The effect of calcination temperature on the structure, crystal phase, and radiation shielding properties was studied for the fabricated compound. The X-ray diffraction diffractometer demonstrates that, the monoclinic crystal phase appeared at a calcination temperature of 250℃ and 500℃ is totally transformed to a high-symmetry hexagonal crystal phase under a calcination temperature of 1000℃. The radiation shielding capacity was also qualified for the fabricated compounds using the Monte Carlo N-Particle transport code in the g-photons energy interval between 15keV and 122keV. The impacts of calcination temperature on the g-ray shielding behavior were clarified in the present study, where the linear attenuation coefficient was enhanced by 218% at energy of 122keV, when the calcination temperature increased from 250 to 1000℃, respectively.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권6호
• /
• pp.1966-1973
• /
• 2023

Virtual reality technology has been widely used in the field of nuclear and radiation safety, dose rate computing in virtual environment is essential for optimizing radiation protection and planning the work in radioactive-controlled area. Because the CPU-based gamma dose rate computing takes up a large amount of time and computing power for voxelization of volumetric radioactive source, it is inefficient and limited in its applied scope. This study is to develop an efficient gamma dose rate computing code and apply into fast virtual simulation. To improve the computing efficiency of the point kernel algorithm in the reference (Li et al., 2020), we design a GPU-based computing framework for taking full advantage of computing power of virtual engine, propose a novel voxelization algorithm of volumetric radioactive source. According to the framework, we develop the GPPK(GPU-based point kernel gamma dose rate computing) code using GPU programming, to realize the fast dose rate computing in virtual world. The test results show that the GPPK code is play and plug for different scenarios of virtual simulation, has a better performance than CPU-based gamma dose rate computing code, especially on the voxelization of three-dimensional (3D) model. The accuracy of dose rates from the proposed method is in the acceptable range.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권6호
• /
• pp.2246-2255
• /
• 2023

Evacuation time estimation (ETE) is crucial for the effective implementation of resident protection measures as well as planning, owing to its applicability to nuclear emergencies. However, as confirmed in the Fukushima case, the ETE performed by nuclear operators does not reflect behavioral features, exposing thus, gaps that are likely to appear in real-world situations. Existing research methods including surveys and interviews have limitations in extracting highly feasible behavioral features. To overcome these limitations, we propose a VR-based immersive experiment system. The VR system realistically simulates nuclear emergencies by structuring existing disasters and human decision processes in response to the disasters. Evacuation behavioral features were quantitatively extracted through the proposed experiment system, and this system was systematically verified by statistical analysis and a comparative study of experimental results based on previous research. In addition, as part of future work, an application method that can simulate multi-level evacuation dynamics was proposed. The proposed experiment system is significant in presenting an innovative methodology for quantitatively extracting human behavioral features that have not been comprehensively studied in evacuation. It is expected that more realistic evacuation behavioral features can be collected through additional experiments and studies of various evacuation factors in the future.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권5호
• /
• pp.1838-1854
• /
• 2023

This paper presents a hybrid algorithm to solve the multi-objective path planning (MOPP) problem for mobile robots in a static nuclear accident environment. The proposed algorithm mimics a real nuclear accident site by modeling the environment with a two-layer cost grid map based on geometric modeling and Monte Carlo calculations. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps. The first step optimizes a path by the hybridization of improved ant colony optimization algorithm-modified A^* (IACO-A^*) that minimizes path length, cumulative radiation dose and energy consumption. The second module is the high radiation dose rate avoidance strategy integrated with the IACO-A^* algorithm, which will work when the mobile robots sense the lethal radiation dose rate, avoiding radioactive sources with high dose levels. Simulations have been performed under environments of different complexity to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, and the results show that IACO-A^* has better path quality than ACO and IACO. In addition, a study comparing the proposed IACO-A^* algorithm and recent path planning (PP) methods in three scenarios has been performed. The simulation results show that the proposed IACO-A^* IACO-A^* algorithm is obviously superior in terms of stability and minimization the total cost of MOPP.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권5호
• /
• pp.1863-1870
• /
• 2023

Molybdenum-99 (⁹⁹Mo) is used for preparing Technetium-99 m (^99mTc), which is the most widely used isotope in nuclear medicine. In this work, a study for ⁹⁹Mo production based on a high-power electron accelerator has been performed as an alternative approach to produce ^99mTc. In this study, Monte Carlo MCNPX2.6 code has been used to examine a novel idea of simultaneous hybrid production of ⁹⁹Mo via both photoneutron and neutron capture reactions using an electron accelerator in heavy water tank. It is expected that this conceptual design including an arrangement of metallic plates of ¹⁰⁰Mo and ⁹⁸Mo produces total activity of 97.5 Ci at the end of 20-h continuous e-beam irradiation (30 MeV, 10 mA).

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권7호
• /
• pp.2395-2406
• /
• 2023

To study the influence of parameter uncertainty in small pressurized water reactor (SPWR) once-through steam generator (OTSG), the nonlinear mathematical model of the SPWR is firstly established. Including the reactor core model, the OTSG model and the pressurizer model. Secondly, a control strategy that both the reactor core coolant average temperature and the secondary-side outlet pressure of the OTSG are constant is adopted. Then, the uncertainty quantification method is established based on Latin hypercube sampling and statistical method. On this basis, the quantitative platform for parameter uncertainty of the OTSG is developed. Finally, taking the uncertainty in primary-side flowrate of the OTSG as an example, the platform application work is carried out under the variable load in SPWR and step disturbance of secondary-side flowrate of the OTSG. The results show that the maximum uncertainty in the critical output parameters is acceptable for SPWR.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권7호
• /
• pp.2697-2711
• /
• 2023

In this study, the validity of reducing the number of gas turbine stages designed for a nitrogen Brayton cycle coupled to a sodium-cooled fast reactor was assessed. The turbine performance was evaluated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations under different off-design conditions controlled by a reduced flow rate and reduced rotational speed. Two different multistage gas turbines designed to extract almost the same specific work were selected: two- and three-stage turbines (mid-span stage loading coefficient: 1.23 and 1.0, respectively). Real gas properties were considered in the CFD simulation in accordance with the Peng-Robinson's equation of state. According to the CFD results, the off-design performance of the two-stage turbine is comparable to that of the three-stage turbine. Moreover, compared to the three-stage turbine, the two-stage turbine generates less entropy across the shock wave. The results indicate that under both design and off-design conditions, increasing the stage loading coefficient for a fewer number of turbine stages is effective in terms of performance and size. Furthermore, the Ellipse law can be used to assess off-design performance and increasing exponent of the expansion ratio term better predicts the off-design performance with a few stages (two or three).

• 한국정보처리학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국정보처리학회 2023년도 춘계학술발표대회
• /
• pp.615-617
• /
• 2023

In recent years, the growing popularity of dogs due to the benefits they bring their owners has contributed to the increase of the number of dogs raised. For owners, it is their responsibility to ensure their dogs' health and safety. However, it is challenging for them to continuously monitor their dogs' activities, which are important to understand and guarantee their wellbeing. In this work, we introduce a camera-based monitoring system to help owners automatically monitor their dogs' activities. The system receives sequences of RGB images and uses YOLOv7 to detect the dog presence, and then applies post-processing to perform dog-centered image cropping on each input sequence. The optical flow is extracted from each sequence, and both sequences of RGB and flow are input to a two-stream EfficientNet to extract their respective features. Finally, the features are concatenated, and a bi-directional LSTM is utilized to retrieve temporal features and recognize the activity. The experiments prove that our system achieves a good performance with the F-1 score exceeding 0.90 for all activities and reaching 0.963 on average.

• 천문학회보
• /
• 제46권1호
• /
• pp.49.3-49.3
• /
• 2021

The 76 cm telescope in Kyung Hee Astronomical Observatory is participating in the small telescope network of the SomangNet project, which started in 2020. Since the installation of the telescope in 1992, the system configuration has been changed several times. The optical system of this telescope has a Ritchey-Chrétien configuration with 76 cm in diameter and the focal ratio is f/7. The mount is a single fork equatorial type and its control system is operated by TheSkyX software. We use a science camera with a 4k × 4k CCD and standard Johnson-Cousins UBVRI filters, which cover a field of view of 23.7 × 23.7 arcmin. We are also developing the Kyung Hee Automatic Observing Software for the 76 cm telescope (KAOS76) for efficient operations. In this work, we present the standard star calibration results, the current status of the system, and the expected science capabilities.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권10호
• /
• pp.3549-3558
• /
• 2023

The jet pump can be used in a test device of a nuclear reactor for high flow amplification as it reduces inlet flow requirement and thereby size of the process components. In the present work, a miniature jet pump was designed to meet high flow amplification greater than 3. Subsequently, experiments were carried out using a test setup for design validation and performance evaluation of the jet pump for different parameters. It was observed that a minimum pressure of 0.6 bar (g) was required for the secondary fluid inside the jet pump to ensure cavitation free performance at high amplification. Spacing between the nozzle tip and the mixing chamber entry point had significant effect on the performance of the jet pump. Variation in primary flow, temperature and area ratio also affected the performance. It was observed that at high flow amplification, the analytical solution differed significantly from experimental results due to very large velocities encountered in the miniature size jet pump.