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At least 757 records · Page 42

Evaluation of Computed Tomography Techniques for Material Identification in Low Level and Intermediate Level Waste - 16648

Measures required to assure long term safe storage of Low-level and intermediate-level short-lived (LIL/SL) waste generated by the nuclear-power industry in France include the characterization of the waste and identification of materials within the waste. Digital Radiography (DR) techniques using x-ray at energies in the 6 MeV range have been shown to be effective for validation of the integrity of the concrete containers, and it was considered that the use of this technique together with the addition of Computed Tomography (CT) techniques could effectively identify materials within the waste. This paper describes the initial evaluation of two DR imaging techniques and two CT techniques using x-ray energy spectra up to 9 MeV to inspect a surrogate waste package, which comprised an outer concrete cylindrical container of 1400 mm diameter with 148 mm wall thickness, and an overall volume of 2 meters cubed, within which a 200 liter drum containing representative heterogeneous inactive waste, was placed in the center and the annulus between the 200 liter drum and the outer cylindrical package was filled with cement grout. The surrogate waste within the 200 liter drum comprised three separate layers of high density, medium density and low density mixed materials. The equipment used was a linear accelerator producing high energy spectra at either 6 MeV or 9 MeV and a high-precision CT manipulator with X, Y, Z and rotation motions, which were common to all techniques investigated. Two different digital detectors were used in the DR and CT performance evaluations, a Digital Detector Array (DDA) comprising a columnar Thallium-doped Cesium-Iodide scintillator screen in intimate contact with a 2 k by 2 k array of amorphous silicon detectors, 200 μm x 200 μm in area, and a Linear Diode Array (LDA) comprising a line of Cadmium-Tungstate columns, 1 cm thick and 400 μm x 400 μm in area. The work comprised evaluations of linear accelerator spectra and the attenuation effects of the waste container and contents, image acquisition performance of each detector, and CT techniques using area detector and linear detector. The results presented in this paper include mathematical evaluation of the two CT techniques, and analysis of measurement data, digital images, CT reconstruction images, and estimated material densities. The data was compared with recorded details and photographs of the actual configuration of materials within the surrogate waste. The Digital Detector Array can generate CT inspection volumes with considerable resolution and detail for the low-density and medium-density sections of the surrogate waste, however, the high-density sections were not imaged with sufficient detail and the images contained a large number of artifacts mainly due to the detectors lack of high energy photon stopping power. Materials identification with the Digital Detector Array, while possible for certain materials, for materials in the steel to plastic density range the attenuation values of the voxels in the reconstruction are too similar and difficult to resolve from the artifacts present. The Linear Diode Array can generate CT inspection volumes of regions of interest of the low-density and medium-density sections with considerable resolution and contrast, and potentially acceptable levels of resolution and contrast of the high-density section of the waste. While a few artifacts were present in the reconstructions, the majority are not due to the fundamental properties of the detector and are considered to be correctable. Materials identification with the LDA inspection data appear to be viable, with steel, copper, and higher-density metals being readily be distinguished from other materials on the basis of voxel value. Future work is needed to obtain a better definition of optimum spatial resolution and inspection speed, and to develop a system of 'calibration rods' which would consist of a series of 50 mm diameter cylinders of 7 materials; Plastic, Teflon, Concrete, Aluminum, Copper, Tungsten and Lead. The cylinders will be distributed at a certain radius in the surrogate waste and will be used as reference points in the evaluation and demonstration of the contrastive performance for the low, medium and high-density cases. The ability to identify the materials within a sealed waste container, by nondestructive examination, enables the verification of waste acceptance criteria without the need to open the waste containers. This eliminates the need for complex and expensive equipment to open and remotely handle the intermediate level waste, avoids potential hazards and risk of personnel dose uptake, and does not increase the volume of waste caused by repackaging of materials after examination and the decontamination or disposal of equipment used.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

High-performance data management for whole slide image analysis in digital pathology

When dealing with giga-pixel digital pathology in whole-slide imaging, a notable proportion of data records holds relevance during each analysis operation. For instance, when deploying an image analysis algorithm on whole-slide images (WSI), the computational bottleneck often lies in the input-output (I/O) system. This is particularly notable as patch-level processing introduces a considerable I/O load onto the computer system. However, this data management process could be further paralleled, given the typical independence of patch-level image processes across different patches. This paper details our endeavors in tackling this data access challenge by implementing the Adaptable IO System version 2 (ADIOS2). Our focus has been constructing and releasing a digital pathology-centric pipeline using ADIOS2, which facilitates streamlined data management across WSIs. Additionally, we’ve developed strategies aimed at curtailing data retrieval times. The performance evaluation encompasses two key scenarios: (1) a pure CPU-based image analysis scenario (“CPU scenario”), and (2) a GPU-based deep learning framework scenario (“GPU scenario”). Our findings reveal noteworthy outcomes. Under the CPU scenario, ADIOS2 showcases an impressive two-fold speed-up compared to the brute-force approach. In the GPU scenario, its performance stands on par with the cutting-edge GPU I/O acceleration framework, NVIDIA Magnum IO GPU Direct Storage (GDS). From what we know, this appears to be among the initial instances, if any, of utilizing ADIOS2 within the field of digital pathology. The source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/adios.

Wang, Xiao↗

Digitized detection of gamma-ray signals concentrated in narrow time windows for transient positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy

A pulsed slow-positron beam generated by an electron linear accelerator was directly used for positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy without any positron storage devices. A waveform digitizer was introduced to simultaneously capture multiple gamma-ray signals originating from positron annihilation events during a single accelerator pulse. The positron pulse was chopped and bunched with the chopper signals also sent to the waveform digitizer. Time differences between the annihilation gamma-ray and chopper peaks were calculated and accumulated as lifetime spectra in a computer. The developed technique indicated that positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy can be performed in a 20 μs time window at a pulse repetition rate synchronous with the linear accelerator. Lifetime spectra of a Kapton sheet and a thermally grown SiO{sub 2} layer on Si were successfully measured. Synchronization of positron lifetime measurements with pulsed ion irradiation was demonstrated by this technique.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

AN ACCURATE NEW METHOD OF CALCULATING ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDES AND K-CORRECTIONS APPLIED TO THE SLOAN FILTER SET

We describe an accurate new method for determining absolute magnitudes, and hence also K-corrections, that is simpler than most previous methods, being based on a quadratic function of just one suitably chosen observed color. The method relies on the extensive and accurate new set of 129 empirical galaxy template spectral energy distributions from Brown et al. A key advantage of our method is that we can reliably estimate random errors in computed absolute magnitudes due to galaxy diversity, photometric error and redshift error. We derive K-corrections for the five Sloan Digital Sky Survey filters and provide parameter tables for use by the astronomical community. Using the New York Value-Added Galaxy Catalog, we compare our K-corrections with those from kcorrect. Our K-corrections produce absolute magnitudes that are generally in good agreement with kcorrect. Absolute griz magnitudes differ by less than 0.02 mag and those in the u band by ∼0.04 mag. The evolution of rest-frame colors as a function of redshift is better behaved using our method, with relatively few galaxies being assigned anomalously red colors and a tight red sequence being observed across the whole 0.0 < z < 0.5 redshift range.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Observational measures of halo properties beyond mass

Different properties of dark matter haloes, including growth rate, concentration, interaction history, and spin, correlate with environment in unique, scale-dependent ways. While these halo properties are not directly observable, galaxies will inherit their host haloes’ correlations with environment. In this paper, we show how these characteristic environmental signatures allow using measurements of galaxy environment to constrain which dark matter halo properties are most tightly connected to observable galaxy properties. Here, we show that different halo properties beyond mass imprint distinct scale-dependent signatures in both the galaxy two-point correlation function and the distribution of distances to galaxies’ kth nearest neighbours, with features strong enough to be accessible even with low-resolution (e.g. grism) spectroscopy at higher redshifts. As an application, we compute observed two-point correlation functions for galaxies binned by half-mass radius at $z$ = 0 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, showing that classic galaxy size models (i.e. galaxy size being proportional to halo spin) as well as other recent proposals show significant tensions with observational data. We show that the agreement with observed clustering can be improved with a simple empirical model in which galaxy size correlates with halo growth.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Electronic device and method for compressing video data

A computer-implemented method for compressing video data comprises receiving a sequence of video data values, each video data value being a digital value from a successive one of a plurality of pixels that form a video sensor, the sequence of video data values resulting from successive frames of video captured by the video sensor; extracting the video data values for each pixel in turn to create a plurality of pixel data streams, each pixel data stream including the video data value for each frame of captured video for the pixel; and applying data compression to each pixel data stream to create compressed data for each pixel data stream.

Tohlen, Michael Aaron↗

Electronic device and method for compressing video data

A computer-implemented method for compressing video data comprises receiving a sequence of video data values, each video data value being a digital value from a successive one of a plurality of pixels that form a video sensor, the sequence of video data values resulting from successive frames of video captured by the video sensor; extracting the video data values for each pixel in turn to create a plurality of pixel data streams, each pixel data stream including the video data value for each frame of captured video for the pixel; and applying data compression to each pixel data stream to create compressed data for each pixel data stream.

Tohlen, Michael Aaron↗

Driven-dissipative quantum mechanics on a lattice: Simulating a fermionic reservoir on a quantum computer

The driven-dissipative many-body problem remains one of the most challenging unsolved problems in quantum mechanics. The advent of quantum computers may provide a unique platform for efficiently simulating such driven-dissipative systems. But, there are many choices for how one can engineer the reservoir. One can simply employ ancilla qubits to act as a reservoir and then digitally simulate them via algorithmic cooling. A more attractive approach, which allows one to simulate an infinite reservoir, is to integrate out the bath degrees of freedom and describe the driven-dissipative system via a master equation, that can also be simulated on a quantum computer. In this work, we consider the particular case of noninteracting electrons on a lattice driven by an electric field and coupled to a fermionic thermostat. Then, we provide two different quantum circuits: the first one reconstructs the full dynamics of the system using Trotter steps, while the second one dissipatively prepares the final nonequilibrium steady state in a single step. We run both circuits on the IBM quantum experience. For circuit (i), we achieved up to five Trotter steps. When partial resets become available on quantum computers, we expect that the maximum simulation time can be significantly increased. Lastly, the methods developed here suggest generalizations that can be applied to simulating interacting driven-dissipative systems.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

A method for normalizing pathology images to improve feature extraction for quantitative pathology

Purpose: With the advent of digital slide scanning technologies and the potential proliferation of large repositories of digital pathology images, many research studies can leverage these data for biomedical discovery and to develop clinical applications. However, quantitative analysis of digital pathology images is impeded by batch effects generated by varied staining protocols and staining conditions of pathological slides. Methods: To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel, fully automated stain normalization method to reduce batch effects and thus aid research in digital pathology applications. Their method, intensity centering and histogram equalization (ICHE), normalizes a diverse set of pathology images by first scaling the centroids of the intensity histograms to a common point and then applying a modified version of contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. Normalization was performed on two datasets of digitized hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) slides of different tissue slices from the same lung tumor, and one immunohistochemistry dataset of digitized slides created by restaining one of the H&E datasets. Results: The ICHE method was evaluated based on image intensity values, quantitative features, and the effect on downstream applications, such as a computer aided diagnosis. For comparison, three methods from the literature were reimplemented and evaluated using the same criteria. The authors found that ICHE not only improved performance compared with un-normalized images, but in most cases showed improvement compared with previous methods for correcting batch effects in the literature. Conclusions: ICHE may be a useful preprocessing step a digital pathology image processing pipeline.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗

Will Stochastic Devices Play Nice With Others in Neuromorphic Hardware?: There’s More to a Probabilistic System Than Noisy Devices

Achieving brain-like efficiency in computing requires a co-design between the development of neural algorithms, brain-inspired circuit design, and careful consideration of how to use emerging devices. The recognition that leveraging device-level noise as a source of controlled stochasticity represents an exciting prospect of achieving brain-like capabilities in probabilistic neural algorithms, but the reality of integrating stochastic devices with deterministic devices in an already-challenging neuromorphic circuit design process is formidable. Here, we explore how the brain combines different signaling modalities into its neural circuits as well as consider the implications of more tightly integrated stochastic, analog, and digital circuits. Further, by acknowledging that a fully CMOS implementation is the appropriate baseline, we conclude that if mixing modalities is going to be successful for neuromorphic computing, it will be critical that device choices consider strengths and limitations at the overall circuit level.

42 ENGINEERING↗

High-Fidelity Modeling of a Type-5 Wind Turbine Gearbox (Intern Poster) [Poster]

Type-5 wind turbines are unique in their use of a permanent magnet synchronous generator, as well as their use of a hydraulic torque converter. This architecture presents an opportunity to provide steady and grid-ready energy without the need for a power converter. With infrastructure continuity and reliability being an important topic amongst renewable energies, researchers have been prompted to further investigate the benefits of type-5 turbines’ unique electromechanical configuration on stable electricity generation. Researchers involved in the WindSG project, SG standing for synchronous generator, are aiming to model a type-5 turbine using Real Time Digital Simulation (RTDS) to evaluate its efficacy in the grid. RSCAD, the software run on the RTDS, comes pre-loaded with electrical and electromechanical components to help simulate electrical generation and grid conditions. However, within this repertoire there is a lack of a component to represent a gearbox with high-fidelity. Within RSCAD’s case studies, the gearbox is often represented simply by a gear ratio value. This presented the task of developing a high-fidelity gearbox model in RSCAD for use in the larger RTDS type-5 wind turbine model. This poster describes a method of developing a lumped parameter mathematical model to represent a planetary-parallel-parallel gearbox in RSCAD for use in RTDS.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Dielectric-Engineered Monolayer MoS 2 Memtransistors for Brain-Inspired Computing with High Recognition Accuracy

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (2D-TMDs)-based memtransistors have emerged as promising candidates for neuromorphic hardware due to their exceptional ability to emulate synaptic behavior. However, many existing 2D-TMDs memtransistors rely on polycrystalline channels with grain boundaries or defects introduced through postgrowth treatments, raising concerns about material integrity and the preservation of intrinsic properties. Here, in this work, we demonstrate a monocrystalline monolayer MoS 2 memtransistor fabricated on a silicon nitride (SiN X ) substrate, achieving a large resistive switching ratio of 10 4 , a dynamic range exceeding 90, along with highly linear and symmetric weight updates, minimal cycle-to-cycle variability, and low device-to-device variability. These attributes are critical for enabling high-performance neuromorphic hardware. Based on experimental data, we further show that these artificial synapses enable a recognition accuracy of more than 97% on the MNIST handwritten digits data set. Our findings present a straightforward approach to realizing 2D-TMDs memtransistors through dielectric engineering, offering a promising platform for next-generation neuromorphic computing systems.

2D TMDs↗

Data-Driven Digital Twin for Reliability Assessment of DC/DC Buck Converter

In commercial applications, the operation of DC/DC converters significantly impacts overall system performance and long-term reliability. This study introduces a data-driven digital twin (DT) approach for estimating critical degradation parameters of DC/DC BUCK converter under steady-state condition. Initially, a circuit-level MATLAB/Simulink digital model (DM C ) is refined against a hardware prototype’s switching model dataset using offline particle swarm optimization. The optimized digital model’s steady-state response is then verified with its average model response while varying the duty and load. Subsequently, degradation profiles are imposed on the inductor, capacitor, MOSFET in the DMC. A large dataset is generated from this model, allowing training, validation, and testing of machine learning (ML) models for component health regression tasks. The proposed method employs random forest ML models, achieving impressive regression results with a squared R value as high as 0.99978 and a root mean square error of 4.2× 10 –6 . The method is further validated on a medium power level DC/DC BUCK prototype with varying load conditions, and includes the analysis of MOSFET’s on-resistance under degradation conditions. This data-driven DT method shows promise for identifying parasitic degradation and ohmic loss parameters, enhancing converter reliability assessments in a non-invasive, generalized, and computationally efficient manner.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

An Interface–Type Memristive Device for Artificial Synapse and Neuromorphic Computing

Interface-type (IT) metal/oxide Schottky memristive devices have attracted considerable attention over filament-type (FT) devices for neuromorphic computing because of their uniform, filament-free, and analog resistive switching (RS) characteristics. The most recent IT devices are based on oxygen ions and vacancies movement to alter interfacial Schottky barrier parameters and thereby control RS properties. However, the reliability and stability of these devices have been significantly affected by the undesired diffusion of ionic species. Herein, a reliable interface-dominated memristive device is demonstrated using a simple Au/Nb-doped SrTiO 3 (Nb:STO) Schottky structure. The Au/Nb:STO Schottky barrier modulation by charge trapping and detrapping is responsible for the analog resistive switching characteristics. Because of its interface-controlled RS, the proposed device shows low device-to-device, cell-to-cell, and cycle-to-cycle variability while maintaining high repeatability and stability during endurance and retention tests. Furthermore, the Au/Nb:STO IT memristive device exhibits versatile synaptic functions with an excellent uniformity, programmability, and reliability. A simulated artificial neural network with Au/Nb:STO synapses achieves a high recognition accuracy of 94.72% for large digit recognition from MNIST database. These results suggest that IT resistive switching can be potentially used for artificial synapses to build next-generation neuromorphic computing.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Validation of finite-element models using full-field experimental data: Levelling finite-element analysis data through a digital image correlation engine

Full-field data from digital image correlation (DIC) provide rich information for finite-element analysis (FEA) validation. However, there are several inherent inconsistencies between FEA and DIC data that must be rectified before meaningful, quantitative comparisons can be made, including strain formulations, coordinate systems, data locations, strain calculation algorithms, spatial resolutions and data filtering. As such, in this paper, we investigate two full-field validation approaches: (1) the direct interpolation approach, which addresses the first three inconsistencies by interpolating the quantity of interest from one mesh to the other, and (2) the proposed DIC-levelling approach, which addresses all six inconsistencies simultaneously by processing the FEA data through a stereo-DIC simulator to ‘level’ the FEA data to the DIC data in a regularisation sense. Synthetic ‘experimental’ DIC data were generated based on a reference FEA of an exemplar test specimen. The direct interpolation approach was applied, and significant strain errorswere computed, even though therewas no model form error, because the filtering effect of theDIC enginewas neglected. In contrast, the levelling approach provided accurate validation results, with no strain error when no model form error was present. Next, model form error was purposefully introduced via a mismatch of boundary conditions. With the direct interpolation approach, the mismatch in boundary conditions was completely obfuscated, while with the levelling approach, it was clearly observed. Finally, the ‘experimental’ DIC datawere purposefully misaligned slightly fromthe FEA data. Both validation techniques suffered from the misalignment, thus motivating continued efforts to develop a robust alignment process. In conclusion, direct interpolation is insufficient, and the proposed levelling approach is required to ensure that the FEA and the DIC data have the same spatial resolution and data filtering. Only after the FEA data have been ‘levelled’ to the DIC data can meaningful, quantitative error maps be computed.

42 ENGINEERING↗