On 1/1/2011 1:29 PM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote:
...

Cool, I wish I knew as much about programming as you do but there's only
so much room in my fat head. :-)

I think so, too, any more... I returned to family farm when Dad
passed away about 10-12 yr ago, now...continued consulting w/ EPRI (aka
Electric Power Research Institute) which had been primary customer for
several years at their I&C Center located at the Kingston Fossil site
(TVA, west of Knoxville, TN) altho was also doing some work for CSI on
products for them thru which I was running the consulting work while
technically an employee in the new products engineering group (had just
released the wireless accelerometer product line to manufacturing the
month Dad passed away which you can look up for an idea of it altho it's
modified significantly in the 10 years hence). While most work over the
years was proprietary or internal R&D that doesn't have directly
referenceable material, another product after the switch from the
commercial nuclear to consulting was the software for a predecessor of
the Remotec ANDROS robot that you can find quite a lot of info on the
current products. The incarnation I worked on was a combination of the
base vehicle w/ a manipulator arm and instrumentation package for
man-replacement purposes in nuclear generating plants and was
Westinghouse-purchased for use in some of their units in S Korea. This
was while Remotec was still privately held by its founders (from ORNL
there in Oak Ridge) several years before was purchased. (Showing my age,
that version consisted of an onboard VME-bus two-processor 68000 w/
another operator console system w/ only a single processor. The system
ran under CP/M w/ the operating code all LMI Forth. That was my first
consulting job on own w/ one other fella' nearly 30 yr ago, now.)

I've several technical reports on models and evaluations of reactor
safety and primarily incore instrumentation which was my specialty area
outside the code maintenance (I was/am, after all, primarily an
engineer, not a programmer despite almost continuous involvement in
code-related work) while at the commercial reactor vendor. These are,
however, not of much general interest altho a couple of the papers
presented at ANS annual meetings did end up being referenced in a major
textbook on radiation detection and instrumentation which was kinda'
kewl...

I won't pretend that discussions on statistical analyses of samples of
reactor containment vessel material evaluation for radiation-damage
lifetime extensions of their concomitant reactors is a worthy subject
for a.h.r so won't provide any report numbers of them or similar work...

Similarly, the evaluations of the nuclear design codes in comparison to
physics startup measurements at the Oconee-class reactors submitted to
and defended in front of the NRC ACRS for final licensing approval to
allow power operation is somewhat esoteric and rather dull for those
outside the field...

The more recent stuff is all pretty much tied up in EPRI owing to their
licensing agreements and can't say too much about it. The last major
task was development of technique for measurement of pulverized coal
mass flow rates in individual pipes (typically 14-20" diameter) to large
power boilers using advanced nonlinear signal processing techniques to
infer the flow from the non-stochastic but chaotic (look up Lorenz
attractor for the idea of non-random but non-repetitive processes)
turbulence noise in the pipes as picked up on a high-frequency
accelerometer.

Anyway, enough geezer talk...

--

I have some understanding of the work you've been involved in enough to
know how important it is to the safety of nuclear plants especially when
it comes to predicting failure of the infrastructure. Tell me if I'm
wrong in assuming that some of the testing involves actually sort
of listening to the pipes to ascertain the condition? A good pipe has
a particular (sound) or characteristic reaction to fluid flow when it's
in good shape? I've worked with vibration sensors to monitor bearings in
chiller plants before so the early signs of failure could be detected
and equipment could be shut down and repaired before a failure
could cause catastrophic damage. I'm also wondering about the types of
failure that could be caused by high pressure, high velocity fluid flow
in pipes in a plant that's running 24/7? You mention turbulence so I
guess cavitation would be another concern? Do the high frequency
vibrations cause stress fractures in the metal of the pipes, flanges
and welds?

TDD