Current ISI and monitoring technologies in European energy industries

This paper reviews available information on the state of practice of inservice material property monitoring performed in European energy industries. Current practice includes a range of standard nondestructive testing and monitoring methods, improved remote sampling and surveillance specimen testing, and new monitoring techniques which are emerging from ongoing development programs. These new technologies include ultrasonic, positron annihilation, neutron diffraction, and magnetic techniques.     

The integral experiment on beryllium with D-T neutrons for verification of tritium breeding

A clean benchmark experiment on beryllium was performed with D-T neutrons at the FNS facility of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The main objective was to verify the integral data related to the tritium production on lithium isotopes. Tritium production rates, as well as activation reaction rates were measured inside the beryllium assembly that was shaped as a pseudo-cylindrical slab with an area-equivalent diameter of 628 mm and a thickness of 355 mm. Experimental results were analyzed with a three-dimensional Monte Carlo transport code MCNP-4C and FENDL/MC-2.0, JENDL-3.2/3.3 neutron transport libraries. Evaluation of reaction rates was based on the cross section data taken from the JENDL Dosimetry File and ENDF B-VI data libraries. Analysis shows that all calculation combinations (transport and activation cross section libraries) used for evaluation of reaction rates give data that is agreeable with measured values within 10%.     

Laboratory and Field Consumer Evaluation Relationships for Menu Items Processed in Retortable Trays for Quantity Foodservice

Problems associated with provision of food in quantity foodservices prompted the development and use of prepared food items processed in retortable trays. Consumer acceptance of such foods was required so that the items could be screened for foodservice application. Consumer tests, using small portion samples and sensory testing under laboratory conditions, gave a relatively reliable prediction of acceptability of most of the items under extended-use consumer testing during a field trial. Final field acceptance of some items was influenced by external factors not accounted for in laboratory testing.     

Diagnostic Data Compression Techniques for Embedded Memories with Built-In Self-Test

A system-on-chip (SOC) usually consists of many memory cores with different sizes and functionality, and they typically represent a significant portion of the SOC and therefore dominate its yield. Diagnostics for yield enhancement of the memory cores thus is a very important issue. In this paper we present two data compression techniques that can be used to speed up the transmission of diagnostic data from the embedded RAM built-in self-test (BIST) circuit that has diagnostic support to the external tester. The proposed syndrome-accumulation approach compresses the faulty-cell address and March syndrome to about 28% of the original size on average under the March-17N diagnostic test algorithm. The key component of the compressor is a novel syndrome-accumulation circuit, which can be realized by a content-addressable memory. Experimental results show that the area overhead is about 0.9% for a 1Mb SRAM with 164 faults. A tree-based compression technique for word-oriented memories is also presented. By using a simplified Huffman coding scheme and partitioning each 256-bit Hamming syndrome into fixed-size symbols, the average compression ratio (size of original data to that of compressed data) is about 10, assuming 16-bit symbols. Also, the additional hardware to implement the tree-based compressor is very small. The proposed compression techniques effectively reduce the memory diagnosis time as well as the tester storage requirement.     

Trace,failure and testing equivalences for communicating processes

A basic question in the theory of communicating processes is “When should two processes be considered equivalent?”. Attempts to answer this question have led to the concepts of observation equivalence, bisimulations, testing equivalence, failure equivalence, etc. The main point of this paper is to increase the understanding and motivation for two of these equivalences, namely failure and testing equivalences. The approach starts with the idea that the equivalence of processes should be reducible to the visible sequences of actions which a process performs in various contexts. This idea is implemented by a string-based semantic order for communicating processes where divergence is catastrophic. Under some assumptions about contexts, the resulting semantics is shown to be equivalent to theimproved failure semantics of Brookes and Roscoe⁽¹⁾ and also to themust testing-semantics of Hennessy and DeNicola.^(2–4) This characterization gives independent support for the appropriateness of failures and testing.     

Increasing testing productivity and software quality: A comparison of software testing methodologies within NASA

Pressure to compress the development life cycle and reduce the duration and resources committed to testing lead to experimentation in testing at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centerís Software Engineering Laboratory. This study investigates the trend to reduce developer testing and increasingly rely upon inspection techniques and independent functional testing to shorten the development life cycle, improve testing productivity, and improve software quality.An approach is developed to conduct this comparison. In particular, the problem faced by software researchers, having a comprehensive characterization of software projects so similar types may be identified for comparative studies, is addressed using expert opinion.     

Three-Dimensional Solution and Experimental Confirmation for the Electric Resistivity Testing of Surface-Breaking Defects in Green-State Powder Metallurgy Compacts

This paper investigates electrostatic voltage distributions around a surface-breaking flaw due to an injected current of known strength. The direct 3-D solution of the voltage behavior over the flawed surface is obtained numerically by the use of a boundary integral formulation. A novel iteration method is applied to solve the resulting electrostatic integral equation for the unknown surface voltage distribution. In addition to investigating the sensitivity of different flaw sizes to the observed surface voltage distribution, important issues such as suitable probe spacing and current flow orientation are studied. For sufficiently small surface-breaking flaws, a simple image source model is developed to evaluate the voltage response of hairline cracks. The model is tested by comparing it with the developed numerical solution. Experiments aimed at establishing the validity of the modeling approach show remarkable agreement with the theoretical model.     

工业CT技术在无损检测炸药部件中的应用综述

综述了美国能源部的有关单位将工业ＣＴ技术用于高能炸药无损检测的研究状况，劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室（ＬＬＮＬ）洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室（ＬＡＮＬ）和潘台克斯工厂（ＰａｎｔｅｘＰｌａｎｔ）在这方面做的大量工作，包括ＣＴ机的建造，实验方法的制定和图像的重建等。测试样品有ＰＢＸ－９５０２，ＰＢＸ－９５０１和ＬＸ－１０－２炸药的药饼和半球，对ＣＴ技术在无损检测高能炸药方面的实用性和优越性作了评价。     

多陀螺自动化测试系统研究

针对动力调谐挠性陀螺大批量生产中存在的性能调试和参数标定工作量大的问题，我们专门研制了一套多陀螺自动化测试系统，该系统主要包括多陀螺真空恒温安装基准体、测控台、计算机程控自动化数据采集和仪器等部分，本文着重介绍该系统的组成原理，设计特点和研制成果。