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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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48 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2016

Theoretical study on the top- and enclosed-contacted single-layer MoS{sub 2} piezotronic transistors

Recently, the piezotronic effect has been observed in two-dimensional single-layer MoS{sub 2} materials, which have potential applications in force and pressure triggered or controlled electronic devices, sensors, and human-machine interfaces. However, classical theory faces the difficulty in explaining the mechanism of the piezotronic effect for the top- and enclosed-contacted MoS{sub 2} transistors, since the piezoelectric charges are assumed to exist only at the edge of the MoS{sub 2} flake that is far from the electronic transport pathway. In the present study, we identify the piezoelectric charges at the MoS{sub 2}/metal-MoS{sub 2} interface by employing both the density functional theory and finite element method simulations. This interface is on the transport pathway of both top- and enclosed-contacted MoS{sub 2} transistors, thus it is capable of controlling their transport properties. This study deepens the understanding of piezotronic effect and provides guidance for the design of two-dimensional piezotronic devices.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2015

Human machine interface to manually drive rhombic like vehicles in remote handling operations

In the thermonuclear experimental reactor ITER, a vehicle named CTS is designed to transport a container with activated components inside the buildings. In nominal operations, the CTS is autonomously guided under supervision. However, in some unexpected situations, such as in rescue and recovery operations, the autonomous mode must be overridden and the CTS must be remotely guided by an operator. The CTS is a rhombic-like vehicle, with two drivable and steerable wheels along its longitudinal axis, providing omni-directional capabilities. The rhombic kinematics correspond to four control variables, which are difficult to manage in manual mode operation. This paper proposes a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to remotely guide the vehicle in manual mode. The proposed solution is implemented using a HMI with an encoder connected to a micro-controller and an analog 2-axis joystick. Experimental results were obtained comparing the proposed solution with other controller devices in different scenarios and using a software platform that simulates the kinematics and dynamics of the vehicle. (authors)

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2014

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Computer-Based Procedures for Field Activities: Results from Three Evaluations at Nuclear Power Plants

The Computer-Based Procedure (CBP) research effort is a part of the Light-Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program, which is a research and development (R&D) program sponsored by Department of Energy (DOE) and performed in close collaboration with industry R&D programs that provides the technical foundations for licensing and managing the long-term, safe, and economical operation of current nuclear power plants. One of the primary missions of the LWRS program is to help the U.S. nuclear industry adopt new technologies and engineering solutions that facilitate the continued safe operation of the plants and extension of the current operating licenses. One area that could yield tremendous savings in increased efficiency and safety is in improving procedure use. Nearly all activities in the nuclear power industry are guided by procedures, which today are printed and executed on paper. This paper-based procedure process has proven to ensure safety; however, there are improvements to be gained. Due to its inherent dynamic nature, a CBP provides the opportunity to incorporate context driven job aids, such as drawings, photos, and just-in-time training. Compared to the static state of paper-based procedures (PBPs), the presentation of information in CBPs can be much more flexible and tailored to the task, actual plant condition, and operation mode. The dynamic presentation of the procedure will guide the user down the path of relevant steps, thus minimizing time spent by the field worker to evaluate plant conditions and decisions related to the applicability of each step. This dynamic presentation of the procedure also minimizes the risk of conducting steps out of order and/or incorrectly assessed applicability of steps.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Verification and Validation of Digitally Upgraded Control Rooms

As nuclear power plants undertake main control room modernization, a challenge is the lack of a clearly defined human factors process to follow. Verification and validation (V&V) as applied in the nuclear power community has tended to involve efforts such as integrated system validation, which comes at the tail end of the design stage. To fill in guidance gaps and create a step-by-step process for control room modernization, we have developed the Guideline for Operational Nuclear Usability and Knowledge Elicitation (GONUKE). This approach builds on best practices in the software industry, which prescribe an iterative user-centered approach featuring multiple cycles of design and evaluation. Nuclear regulatory guidance for control room design emphasizes summative evaluation—which occurs after the design is complete. In the GONUKE approach, evaluation is also performed at the formative stage of design—early in the design cycle using mockups and prototypes for evaluation. The evaluation may involve expert review (e.g., software heuristic evaluation at the formative stage and design verification against human factors standards like NUREG-0700 at the summative stage). The evaluation may also involve user testing (e.g., usability testing at the formative stage and integrated system validation at the summative stage). An additional, often overlooked component of evaluation is knowledge elicitation, which captures operator insights into the system. In this report we outline these evaluation types across design phases that support the overall modernization process. The objective is to provide industry-suitable guidance for steps to be taken in support of the design and evaluation of a new human-machine interface (HMI) in the control room. We suggest the value of early-stage V&V and highlight how this early-stage V&V can help improve the design process for control room modernization. We argue that there is a need to overcome two shortcomings of V&V in current practice—the propensity for late-stage V&V and the use of increasingly complex psychological assessment measures for V&V.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Bridging the gap: adapting advanced display technologies for use in hybrid control rooms

The Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), runs the OECD Halden Reactor Project (HRP), featuring a state-of-the-art research simulator facility in Halden, Norway, called HAMMLAB. HAMMLAB serves two main purposes: the study of human behaviour in interaction with complex process systems; and the development, test and evaluation of prototype control centres and their individual systems. By studying operator performance in HAMMLAB and integrating the knowledge gained into new designs, the HRP contributes to improving operational safety, reliability, efficiency and productivity. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program has contracted IFE to assist DOE national laboratory staff at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in adapting HAMMLAB design concepts for the purpose of control room modernization at nuclear power plants in the U.S. In support of this effort, the DOE has built a simulator research facility at INL called the Human Systems Simulation Laboratory (HSSL). The HSSL is centered on control room modernization, in which industry provided plant instrumentation and controls are modified for upgrade opportunities. The HSSL houses the LWRS simulator, which is a reconfigurable full-scale and full-scope control room simulator. Consisting of 45 large touchscreens on 15 panels, the LWRS simulator is currently using this glass top technology to digitally represent and replicate the functionality of the analog I&C systems in existing control rooms. The LWRS simulator is reconfigurable in that different plant training simulator models obtained from the utilities can be run on the panels, and the panels can be physically moved and arranged to mimic the layout of those control rooms. The glass top technology and reconfigurability capabilities allow the LWRS simulator to be the research platform that is necessary to design, prototype, and validate human-system interface (HSI) technologies that can replace existing analog I&C. IFE has recently assisted INL in establishing the technical infrastructure for implementation of HSI prototypes from HAMMLAB into the HSSL to demonstrate relevant control room replacement systems in support of the LWRS program. In March, 2014, IFE delivered the first HSI prototype utilizing this infrastructure — a large screen overview display for INL's simulator. The co-operation now continues by developing Procedure Support Displays targeted for operators in hybrid control room settings. These prototypes are being validated with U.S. reactor operators in the HSSL and optimized to enhance their performance. This research serves as a crucial stepping stone toward incorporation of advanced display technologies into conventional main control rooms.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Core Monitoring System for TSN EPR Reactors

In the context of Chinese (TSN) EPR reactors project, a new on-line support system was introduced to give information, either continuously or upon request, to the plant operators about some advanced physics parameters corresponding to the current state of the nuclear core. This document provides a description of the functions that are available and the advantages provided by using their results. For each function the Human Machine Interface (HMI) is illustrated. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Human machine interface to manually drive rhombic like vehicles such as transport casks in ITER

The Cask and Plug Remote Handling System (CPRHS) and the respective Cask Transfer System (CTS) are designed to transport activated components between the reactor and the hot cell buildings of ITER during maintenance operations. In nominal operation, the CPRHS/CTS shall operate autonomously under human supervision. However, in some unexpected situations, the automatic mode must be overridden and the vehicle must be remotely guided by a human operator due to the harsh conditions of the environment. The CPRHS/CTS is a rhombic-like vehicle with two independent steerable and drivable wheels along its longitudinal axis, giving it omni-directional capabilities. During manual guidance, the human operator has to deal with four degrees of freedom, namely the orientations and speeds of two wheels. This work proposes a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to manage the degrees of freedom and to remotely guide the CPRHS/CTS in ITER taking the most advantages of rhombic like capabilities. Previous work was done to drive each wheel independently, i.e., control the orientation and speed of each wheel independently. The results have shown that the proposed solution is inefficient. The attention of the human operator becomes focused in a single wheel. In addition, the proposed solution cannot assure that the commands accomplish the physical constrains of the vehicle, resulting in slippage or even in clashes. This work proposes a solution that consists in the control of the vehicle looking at the position of its center of mass and its heading in the world frame. The solution is implemented using a rotational disk to control the vehicle heading and a common analogue joystick to control the vector speed of the center of the mass of the vehicle. The number of degrees of freedom reduces to three, i.e., two angles (vehicle heading and the orientation of the vector speed) and a scalar (the magnitude of the speed vector). This is possible using a kinematic model based on the vehicle Instantaneous Center of Rotation (ICR): a geometric approach where, at each time instant, the vehicle describes a circumference (either with a finite or infinite radius). The inverse of the kinematic model transforms the three input parameters of the center of mass into the four parameters for the wheels, preserving the omni-directional capabilities. The solution is implemented and tested using a HMI with a control disk and an analog joystick with two axis. The control disk was specially designed for this solution and implemented using a programmable micro-controller. In the first set of experiments, the HMI communicates with a computer running a simulator of the CPRHS/CTS, with the vehicle kinematics and dynamics, moving in a map of the ITER buildings. In the second set of experiments, the HMI communicates with a scaled prototype of the CPRHS running in a mock-up scenario to obtain more realistic results. Several type of tests were performed to evaluate the usability of the HMI. Different human operators without knowledge neither experience with this interface were invited to test the HMI. The operators had to drive the vehicle from an initial place to a final destination under the following conditions: with a pre-computed path to help guidance, without any path, with the information of the closest obstacles and without any help. The performance was evaluated using the time duration of the operation, the energy required to perform the described path, the risk of collision and, in case of a pre-computed path, the comparison between paths. In addition, each operator tested the HMI several times to evaluate the performance along consecutive trials. (authors)

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2019

Augmented Reality for Managing Nuclear Infrastructure and Operations - 19605

Emerging augmented reality tools offer great promise for helping manage nuclear infrastructure throughout its life cycle. These tools have the ability to provide operators with actionable holographic information as they work. Perhaps more excitingly these tools also feature sensors that provide the ability to document work at very high spatial resolution. These sensors include onboard cameras as well as active infrared sensors that can capture 3D geometry information on-the-fly. Coupling the visualization and sensing tools provided by augmented reality headsets with computational intelligence opens up many exciting new possibilities for managing nuclear infrastructure throughout its life cycle. In this presentation we show a number of examples of how augmented reality tools can be incorporated into the management of nuclear infrastructure. We show examples of using augmented reality as a human-machine interface for robotic control, and we show examples of augmented reality being interfaced with external sensors. Finally, we show how these sensing and visualization capabilities of augmented reality can be interfaced with intelligent algorithms to help operators perform their work in nuclear facilities. The goal of the work is to spark discussions on how emerging augmented reality tools can help enable the next generation of efficient, high-performance nuclear infrastructure. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2017

A structured data model frame for human factors application - 175

Building a Human Factors analysis and Verification and Validation case for new control rooms and even for control room modifications is a highly labor intensive project. Any optimization that can be made in the process translates into savings in the overall control room project schedule and budget. Several support tools from word, to excel, mind maps and databases have been traditionally used by human factors practitioners to conduct the analysis and document its results. While the use of these tools has had satisfactory results, they don't provide in our experience strong enough means for configuration control management, to avoid duplicities, streamline the analysis processes and allow collaborative team efforts. This paper documents how the established practices (methods, processes and tools) were questioned, which were the sources for comparison and how the results were translated into requirements for the new tool constituting the data frame model for Human Factors Engineering applications. The exercise has allowed us to evaluate the efficiency of our current practices in comparison to previous ones while improving our compliance with the quality assurance standards. (authors)

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2017

Human Factors Principles in Information Dashboard Design - 278

Refueling outages remain one of the largest opportunities for improving capacity factor and reducing costs available to commercial nuclear power plants. Although the nuclear industry has made steady improvement in outage optimization, each day of a refueling outage still represents an opportunity to save millions of dollars and each day an outage extends past its planned end date represents millions of dollars that may have been spent unnecessarily. Reducing planned outage duration or preventing outage extensions requires careful management of the outage schedule as well as constant oversight and monitoring of work completion during the outage execution. During a typical outage, there are typically more than 10,000 activities on the schedule that, if not managed efficiently, may cause expensive outage delays. Management of outages currently relies largely on paper-based resources and general-purpose office software. A typical method currently used to monitor work performance is a burn-down curve, where total remaining activities are plotted against the baseline schedule to track bulk work completion progress. While methods like this are useful, there is still considerable uncertainty during a typical outage whether bulk work progress is adequate and therefore a lot of management time is spent analyzing the situation on a daily basis. This paper is a case study of how new technology, in combination with established human-factors and user-centered design knowledge, can be used to support Outage Control Center (OCC) personnel decision making. In particular, we describe recent advances made in developing a framework for the design of visual outage information presentation, as well as an overview of the human factors principles that informed the development of the visualizations. To test the utility of advanced visual outage information presentation, an outage management dashboard software application was created as part of the Department of Energy's Advanced Outage Control Center project (AOCC). This dashboard is intended to present all the critical information an outage manager would need to understand the current status of a refueling outage. The dashboard presents the critical path, bulk work performance, key performance indicators, outage milestones and metrics relating current performance to historical performance. Additionally, the dashboard includes data analysis tools to allow outage managers to drill down into the underlying data to understand the drivers of the indicators. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Training and certification of human organizational factors designers in nuclear plant engineering - 344

Performing an increasing number of small and large-scope nuclear Human Factors Programs, AREVA NP is facing the challenging situation that (1) well-trained experts in Human Factors or Usability Engineering are currently hard to find and (2) newly hired ones need at least two years 'on the job' to become familiar with the nuclear field and the complexity of engineering Human Factors in this field. To innovatively meet this challenge we focus instead on company-internal engineers. Demonstrated nuclear engineering knowledge and skills and pronounced interest to extend both renders them optimal applicants to the AREVA NP two years Human Organizational Factors Training and Certification program. The AREVA NP training shall convey Human Factors knowledge and skills within the limited time of two years. We also stress the need to change participants' mindset from a technically-biased to a human-centered approach, committed to involve end-users throughout design. Next to psychology principles, user testing, user-centered design, plant operation principles, and the acquisition and documentation of users' requirements, design constraints, and inherent tradeoffs, participants will be trained to apply learned methods in a real environment and meet the challenges of real projects. The following sections provide insights in the training conception and preparation phase, the identification of appropriate candidates, the development of course syllabuses, and the schedule of lectures and tests. The promising experiences made thus far are reported as well. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Implementation of Software Tools for Hybrid Control Rooms in the Human Systems Simulation Laboratory

The Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) and Idaho National Laboratory have designed, implemented, tested and installed a functioning prototype of a set of large screen overview and procedure support displays for the Generic Pressurized Water Reactor (GPWR) simulator in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Human Systems Simulation Laboratory. The overview display is based on IFE’s extensive experiences with large screen overview displays in the Halden Man-Machine Laboratory (HAMMLAB), and presents the main control room indicators on a combined three-screen display. The procedure support displays are designed and implemented to provide a compact but still comprehensive overview of the relevant process measurements and indicators to support operators' good situational awareness during the performance of various types of procedures and plant conditions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗