Flexblue® Underwater Reactor: Introduction To The Concept And To The Passive Safety Strategy For A Steam Generator Tube Rupture Accident

Nuclear power plants (NPPs), which are operating and under construction are large-scale reactors with an electrical output around 1,000 MWe. These plants do not address the needs of developing countries or archipelagos, where the grids are smaller and the investment capacities are limited. For this reason, many nuclear designers develop Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which can generate electrical output below 300 MWe. DCNS offers a FLEXBLUE® as a solution to the problem. FLEXBLUE® is a subsea-based Small Modular Reactor and fully transportable nuclear module. A FLEXBLUE® module is designed for the single purpose of delivering electricity to the grid. Its power output is 160 MWe and is sent to the grid by submarine cables. The goal of this study is to work out an innovative strategy to handle a steam generator tube rupture with passive systems only, without releasing any radioactive elements to the environment, and without flooding the containment.

Mélange de surfaces en temps réel : visualisation, contrôle des déformations et application à la modélisation

Les surfaces implicites ont été perçues au cours des années 80, comme une alternative intéressante aux modélisations paramétriques des surfaces (NURBS, etc). Elles sont définies comme l'ensemble des points de même valeur d'un champ potentiel, c'est-à-dire la frontière de deux volumes. Ainsi elles possèdent des propriétés avantageuses dans le cadre de la modélisation géométrique: gestion automatique de la topologie, garantie de manipuler des entités manifold, possibilité de définir des transitions lisses entre des objets se fusionnant. Elles furent cependant délaissées au début des années 2000 en raison des contraintes qu'elles imposent: évaluation et affichage coûteux en temps de calcul, et forme des surfaces difficilement contrôlables. Les contributions de cette thèse proposent des solutions à ces problématiques de la modélisation par surfaces implicites. Il est tout d'abord montré qu'une nouvelle structure d'accélération, combinant les propriétés d'une hiérarchie de volumes englobants et d'un Kd-Tree, permet d'accélérer l'affichage par lancer de rayons d'un grand nombre de surfaces implicites. Il est ainsi possible d'animer en temps réel une surface de type fluide, définie par les points d'isovaleur d'un champ potentiel obtenu par la somme de primitives simples. Les opérateurs simples de composition de surfaces implicites, tels que la somme, permettent d'évaluer rapidement des champs potentiels combinant plusieurs milliers de primitives. Néanmoins, l'apparence organique des surfaces produites est difficile à contrôler. Cette thèse propose un nouveau type d'opérateur de composition, utilisant à la fois les valeurs et les gradients des champs potentiels sources, qui permet d'avoir beaucoup plus de contrôle sur la forme des surfaces produites tout en supprimant les effets indésirables des opérateurs classiques, tels que le gonflement à l'intersection de surfaces ou la fusion de surfaces proches. Enfin il est montré comment ces opérateurs de mélange peuvent être utilisés pour déformer des surfaces de type maillage, animées par un squelette. Nous définissons un champ potentiel par composition de primitives implicites générées aux arêtes du squelette. A chaque déformation du squelette, le champ potentiel est lui aussi déformé par les opérateurs de composition choisis: ces déformations peuvent être reproduites sur le maillage en déplaçant chaque sommet du maillage jusqu'à la surface d'isovaleur correspondante à leur valeur de potentiel initiale. Cette technique permet d'obtenir rapidement des déformations plausibles au niveau des articulations des membres modélisésImplicit surfaces have been considered during the eightees as a promising alternative to parametric surfaces (NURBS patches, etc...). They are defined as the set of points having the same value of a scalar field, thus spliting the space into two volumes. Their volumetric nature confers them interesting properties for geometric modeling: the topology of objects is handled automatically, geometries are guaranteed to be manifold and they can produce smooth blendings of objects easily. However, they were abandoned at the beginning of the 21st century due to the limitations they impose: they are computationally expensive to evaluate and to display, and the shape of the transition between objects is difficult to control. This thesis proposes new solutions to these problems in implicit surfaces modeling. First of all, it is shown that the use of a new object-partitioning structure, mixing the properties of a bounding volume hierarchy and a Kd-Tree, makes it possible to raytrace a large number of implicit primitives at interactive frame rates. Therefore it allows real time visualization of fluid-like shapes, defined as an isosurface of a potential field computed as the sum of simple primitives. Simple composition operators of implicit surfaces, such as the sum operator, allow a fast computation of a potential field combining thousands of primitives. Nevertheless, the shape of the resulting surfaces is organic and difficult to control. In this thesis, a new kind of composition operators is proposed, which takes both the value and the gradient of the source potential fields as input. These operators give much more control on the shape of the surfaces, and they avoid the classical problems of implicit surfaces composition, such as bulging at the intersection of two primitives or blending of surfaces at a distance. Finally, a new skeleton-based animation technique is presented which reproduces the deformations of some implicit surfaces on a given mesh. We define a potential field as the composition of implicit primitives generated at the bones of the skeleton. Thus each motion of the skeleton will cause distortions in the associated potential field. These distortions can be reproduced on the mesh by moving each of its vertices to the isosurface of the potential field corresponding to their initial potential value. This technique is able to produce rapidly realistic deformations on the limbs of an articulated model of a bod

Assessment of Vitamin A Status of Preschool Children in a Sub-Saharan African Setting: Comparative Advantage of Modified Relative-dose Response Test

A nationally-representative sample of 2,696 preschool children living in Congo was examined during August-September 2003 to determine the rates of vitamin A deficiency. Ninety clusters of 30 children, aged six months to six years, were selected, using a randomized two-level cluster-sampling method. Vitamin A deficiency was determined by assessing the prevalence of active xerophthalmia (nightblindness and/or Bitot spots) in the cross-over sample of 2,696 individuals. A semi-quantitative seven-day dietary questionnaire was concurrently applied to the mothers of children enrolled to estimate the latter's consumption of vitamin A-rich food. Vitamin A status was assessed by performing the modified relative dose-response test (MRDR) on dried blood spots (DBS) from a subsample of 207 children aged less than six years and the impression cytology with transfer (ICT) test on a subsample of 1,162 children. Of the children enrolled, 5.2% suffered from nightblindness, 8.0% had Bitot spots, and 2.5% had other vitamin A deficiency sequellae. Fifty-three percent of the ICT tests showed the presence of vitamin A deficiency. The biochemical MRDR test showed that the vitamin A status of 30% of the study children was critical. Twenty-seven of them had retinol levels of <10 μg/dL [mean±standard deviation (SD) 7.02±2.0 μg/dL], and 50% had retinol levels of 10-20 μg/dL (mean±SD 14.2±2.83 μg/dL). The poor health status and low rates of consumption of vitamin A-rich food are the main factors determining critical status. Vitamin A deficiency, reflecting poor nutrition and health, is a serious public-health issue among children aged less than six years in Congo

Adequate Inner Bound for Geometric Modeling with Compact Field Function

International audienceRecent advances in implicit surface modeling now provide highly controllable blending effects. These effects rely on the field functions of $\mathbb{R}^3 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ in which the implicit surfaces are defined. In these fields, there is an outside part in which blending is defined and an inside part. The implicit surface is the interface between these two parts. As recent operators often focus on blending, most efforts have been made on the outer part of field functions and little attention has been paid on the inner part. Yet, the inner fields are important as soon as difference and intersection operators are used. This makes its quality as crucial as the quality of the outside. In this paper, we analyze these shortcomings, and deduce new constraints on field functions such that differences and intersections can be seamlessly applied without introducing discontinuities or field distortions. In particular, we show how to adapt state of the art gradient-based union and blending operators to our new constraints. Our approach enables a precise control of the shape of both the inner or outer field boundaries. We also introduce a new set of asymmetric operators tailored for the modeling of fine details while preserving the integrity of the resulting fields

A Gradient-Based Implicit Blend

International audienceWe introduce a new family of binary composition operators that solves four major problems of constructive implicit modeling: suppressing bulges when two shapes merge, avoiding unwanted blending at a distance, ensuring that the resulting shape keeps the topology of the union, and enabling sharp details to be added without being blown up. The key idea is that field functions should not only be combined based on their values, but also on their gradients.We implement this idea through a family of C1 composition operators evaluated on the GPU for efficiency, and illustrate it by applications to constructive modeling and animation

Implicit Skinning: Real-Time Skin Deformation with Contact Modeling

SIGGRAPH 2013 Conference ProceedingsInternational audienceGeometric skinning techniques, such as smooth blending or dualquaternions, are very popular in the industry for their high performances, but fail to mimic realistic deformations. Other methods make use of physical simulation or control volume to better capture the skin behavior, yet they cannot deliver real-time feedback. In this paper, we present the first purely geometric method handling skin contact effects and muscular bulges in real-time. The insight is to exploit the advanced composition mechanism of volumetric, implicit representations for correcting the results of geometric skinning techniques. The mesh is first approximated by a set of implicit surfaces. At each animation step, these surfaces are combined in real-time and used to adjust the position of mesh vertices, starting from their smooth skinning position. This deformation step is done without any loss of detail and seamlessly handles contacts between skin parts. As it acts as a post-process, our method fits well into the standard animation pipeline. Moreover, it requires no intensive computation step such as collision detection, and therefore provides real-time performances

Assessment of vitamin A status of preschool children in a sub-Saharan African setting: Comparative advantage of modified relative-dose response test

A nationally-representative sample of 2, 696 preschool children living in Congo was examined during Au-gust-September 2003 to determine the rates of vitamin A deficiency. Ninety clusters of 30 children, aged six months to six years, were selected, using a randomized two-level cluster-sampling method. Vitamin A deficiency was determined by assessing the prevalence of active xerophthalmia (nightblindness and/or Bitot spots) in the cross-over sample of 2, 696 individuals. A semi-quantitative seven-day dietary question-naire was concurrently applied to the mothers of children enrolled to estimate the latter\u2032s consumption of vitamin A-rich food. Vitamin A status was assessed by performing the modified relative dose-response test (MRDR) on dried blood spots (DBS) from a subsample of 207 children aged less than six years and the im-pression cytology with transfer (ICT) test on a subsample of 1, 162 children. Of the children enrolled, 5. 2% suffered from nightblindness, 8. 0% had Bitot spots, and 2. 5% had other vitamin A deficiency sequellae. Fifty-three percent of the ICT tests showed the presence of vitamin A deficiency. The biochemical MRDR test showed that the vitamin A status of 30% of the study children was critical. Twenty-seven of them had retinol levels of &lt; 10 \u3bcg/dL [mean\ub1standard deviation (SD) 7. 02\ub1 2. 0 \u3bcg/dL], and 50% had retinol levels of 10- 20 \u3bcg/dL (mean\ub1SD 14. 2\ub1 2. 83 \u3bcg/dL). The poor health status and low rates of consumption of vitamin A-rich food are the main factors determining critical status. Vitamin A deficiency, reflecting poor nutrition and health, is a serious public-health issue among children aged less than six years in Congo

Convolution filtering of continuous signed distance fields for polygonal meshes

Signed distance fields obtained from polygonal meshes are commonly used in various applications. However, they can have C1 discontinuities causing creases to appear when applying operations such as blending or metamorphosis. The focus of this work is to efficiently evaluate the signed distance function and to apply a smoothing filter to it while preserving the shape of the initial mesh. The resulting function is smooth almost everywhere, while preserving the exact shape of the polygonal mesh. Due to its low complexity, the proposed filtering technique remains fast compared to its main alternatives providing C1-continuous distance field approximation. Several applications are presented such as blending, metamorphosis and heterogeneous modelling with polygonal meshes

Prevalence of Vitamin A Deficiency in Pregnant and Lactating Women in the Republic of Congo

Vitamin A status in a sample of pregnant and lactating women living in several representative regions of Congo was assessed and compared between August and September 2004. This survey was conducted using a randomized two-stage cluster-sampling method with stratification on 90 clusters, each consisting of at least 15 women. Vitamin A status was determined in a total of 1,054 individuals, using the impression cytology with transfer (ICT) test, the modified relative dose response test (MRDR test) on dried blood spots (DBS), and clinical examination to detect signs of xerophthalmia. The clinical criterion defining vitamin A deficiency was the presence of active xerophthalmia (Bitot's spots [X1B]), active corneal disease), and/ or night blindness (XN stage). The prevalence of clinical signs of stage XN and X1B xerophthalmia in the Republic of Congo was found to be 16% and 19% respectively. The prevalence of clinical signs (X1B) was greater in the rural north than in urban areas, with a gradient running from urban (5%) to rural area (33%); 27% of all the ICT tests showed that the subjects were suffering from vitamin A deficiency. The deficiency rates were significantly higher (p&lt;0.001) in urban surroundings (Brazzaville) than in the rural northern regions. The biochemical MRDR test showed the presence of vitamin A deficiency ( 650.06) in 26% of the mothers in Brazzaville compared to 6% in the town of Kouilou; 44% of the women had retinol levels of &lt;10 \ub5g/dL in the rural north whereas these percentages were significantly lower in the urban areas surveyed (chi-square=62.30, p&lt;0.001). A significant correlation was found to exist (p&lt;0.001) between the ICT test and the MRDR test on DBS. In the population as a whole, 30% of the mothers suffering from malarial attack had abnormally low MRDR levels ( 650.06) compared to no malaria. The results of the present study confirm that vitamin A deficiency is a serious public-health issue in pregnant and lactating mothers in the Republic of Congo