The engineering measurement methods arc interesting from a t

The engineering measurement methods arc interesting from a technological point of view but engineers must be aware that engineering measurement solutions con have an impact on people\'s lives in both positive and negative ways. It is important for engineers to keep up with the latest technologies but also the current politics, societal issues, etc. This assignment is to describe different techniques, instruments and sensors that uses this technology in engineering measurements, and to explore the impact of these techniques on some contemporary issues like social, economic, safety, cost, politic, nuclear waste and proliferation, environmental pollution, disease, human rights, quality of life, and any other issues. Identify and list contemporary issues related to your work and state whether these issues needs an engineering solution, or influenced by engineering solutions, or participate in solving an engineering problem.

Solution

The nuclear technology has been widely used in the world. The research of measurement in nuclear installations involves many aspects, such as nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel cycle, safety and security, nuclear accident, after action, analysis, and environmental applications. In last decades, many advanced measuring devices and techniques have been widely applied in nuclear installations.

Nuclear power reactors instrumentations:

Instrumentations to measuring the neutron fission, the neutron dose, the flux, the reactor fission rate, and temperature are discussed. Here instrumentations contain Micro-Me-gas detectors, noise thermometer, tissue equivalent proportional counter, high-temperature thermocouples, liquid scintillation detector, spectrometers, optical fiber sensors, Uranium Fission chamber, etc.

Nuclear power reactor measurent:

Measurement methods contain indium foils methods, solid state nuclear track detection, time-of-flight technique, microwave propagation methods, optical dosimetry, accelerator mass spectrometry, gamma spectrometry and swept wavelength interferometry, and so forth. These measurement methods can be used to measure neutron flux, reactor fission rate, absolute energy of cold neutrons, radiation field intensity, etc.

Nuclear fuel cycle instrumentation:

The nuclear fuel cycle consists of steps in the front end, which are the preparation of the fuel, steps in the service period, in which the fuel is used during reactor operation, and steps in the back end, which are necessary to safely manage, contain, and either reprocess or dispose of spent nuclear fuel. The instrumentations can measure nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear fuel in-pool, spent fuel assembly, the absolute energy-integrated flux and the energy spectrum of anti-neutrinos emitted adopted optical fiber sensor,etc.

Measurement methods for nuclear fuel cycle:

Nuclear fuel cycle includes manufacture of reactor fuel element and fuel preparation, nuclear fuel materials cycle, the composition of fuel rod, reprocessing of fast reactor fuel,etc.All of these steps can be measured by neutron absorption technique, detection of high energy gamma rays emitted methods, DFT methods, nondestructive acoustic method, etc.

Safeguards and homeland security:

Many nuclear instrumentations and measurement methods for safe and secure environmental applications will be discussed. Recently, the mainly nuclear instrumentations and measurement methods include Nondestructive Assay (NDA) techniques, Temperature Semiconductor (TS) detector, Na/I detector, High Pressure xenon (HPXe) detector, plastic scintillator, genetic programming algorithm, automated analytical chemistry laboratory instrumentation and tamper-resistant liquid level/accountability instrumentation, system, which can be used for guarantee safeguards and homeland security.

Nuclear safeguards rely, in part, on NDA verification of nuclear material. Typically, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) relies on both neutron and gamma ray-based NDA techniques for verification measurements. These verifications can be either qualitative or quantitative.

Nuclear accident, after action and analysis:

Nuclear accident is bloodcurdling for humanity, so we should positively prevent the nuclear accidents and analyse the damage caused by nuclear accident. There are different measuring devices and methods used for diagnosing accidental conditions, monitoring and alarming of nuclear equipment in accidental conditions, and analysis of nuclear accident. Instruments and measurements methods consist of Support Vector Classification (SVC), Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), Back Propagation Network Algorithm (BPNA), Alarm Filtering and Diagnostic System (AFDS), Gamma Spectrometry (GS), Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors (SSNTD), and so forth.

As a means of effectively managing severe accidents at nuclear power plants, it is important to identify and diagnose accident initiating events within a short time interval.