Characterization of sources of radioargon in a research reactor

textOn Site Inspection is the final measure for verifying compliance of Member States with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. In order to enable the use of ³⁷Ar as a radiotracer for On Site Inspection, the sources of radioargon background must be characterized and quantified. A radiation transport model of the University of Texas at Austin Nuclear Engineering Teaching Laboratory (NETL) TRIGA reactor was developed to simulate the neutron flux in various regions of the reactor. An activation and depletion code was written to calculate production of ³⁷Ar in the facility based on the results of the radiation transport model. Results showed ³⁷Ar production rates of (6.567±0.31)×10² Bq·kWh⁻¹ in the re- actor pool and the air-filled irradiation facilities, and (5.811±0.40)×10⁴ Bq·kWh⁻¹ in the biological shield. Although ⁴⁰Ca activation in the biological shield was found to dominate the total radioargon inventory, the contribution to the effluent release rate would be diminished by the immobility of Ar generated in the concrete matrix and the long diffusion path of mobile radioargon. Diffusion of radioargon out of the reactor pool was found to limit the release rate but would not significantly affect the integrated release activity. The integrated ³⁷Ar release for an 8 hour operation at 950 kW was calculated to be (1.05±0.8)×10⁷ Bq, with pool emissions continuing for days and biological shield emissions continuing for tens of days following the operation. Sensitivity analyses showed that estimates for the time-dependent concentrations of ³⁷Ar in the NETL TRIGA could be made with the calculated buildup coefficients or through analytical solution of the activation equations for only (n,[gamma]) reactions in stable argon or (n,[alpha]) reactions in ⁴⁰Ca. Analyses also indicated that, for a generalized system, the integrated thermal flux can be used to calculate the buildup due to air activation and the integrated fast flux can be used to calculate the buildup due to calcium activation. Based on the results of the NETL TRIGA, an estimate of the global research reactor source term for ³⁷Ar and an estimate of ground-level ³⁷Ar concentrations near a facility were produced.Mechanical Engineerin

The Egyptian Revolution Goes Viral: Reading Categories of Tweets in the Twitter-created Networked Public Sphere

The expansion of online social media (OSM) and networked information technology (NIT) use has coincided with reinvigorated democratic movements around the world, including the toppling of authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. This paper examines the variety of uses for Twitter during the Egyptian revolution, as Hosni Mubarak’s regime collapsed in less than three weeks after 30 years in power. To achieve this analysis, this paper first divided the revolution into Fisk’s four stages of political crisis. Next, the authors extracted 37,634 tweets containing key words from an archive of 16 million tweets collected from January 23-February 8, 2011. It then identified 14 categories of tweets (including Call to Action, Information Sharing, Expression of Support, and Opinion) by manually annotating a randomly selected sample of nearly 6,000 sent during the uprising. This manual annotation allowed the authors to develop category-specific patterns. After entering these patterns into a Java program, the authors ran an Automatic Content Analysis that tallied the number of tweets in each category per stage of political crisis. By correlating the Content Analysis results with the known chronology of the revolution, the results provide the answers to several questions regarding the use of Twitter during the political crisis. Throughout the revolution, Twitter was primarily used as an information-sharing tool, distributing news, updates, and critical information to protesters. As the crisis progressed, however the uses of Twitter adapted to various government policies and developments in the uprising. This examination of Twitter use can also serve as a stepping stone for other political or information scientists interested in studying the networked public sphere (NPS) and how the use of technology affects political movements

Accessing and Interpreting OPC UA Event Traces based on Semantic Process Descriptions

The analysis of event data from production systems is the basis for many applications associated with Industry 4.0. However, heterogeneous and disjoint data is common in this domain. As a consequence, contextual information of an event might be incomplete or improperly interpreted which results in suboptimal analysis results. This paper proposes an approach to access a production systems' event data based on the event data's context (such as the product type, process type or process parameters). The approach extracts filtered event logs from a database system by combining: 1) a semantic model of a production system's hierarchical structure, 2) a formalized process description and 3) an OPC UA information model. As a proof of concept we demonstrate our approach using a sample server based on OPC UA for Machinery Companion Specifications.Comment: Copyright 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

A Mapping Approach to Convert MTPs into a Capability and Skill Ontology

Being able to quickly integrate new equipment and functions into an existing plant is a major goal for both discrete and process manufacturing. But currently, these two industry domains use different approaches to achieve this goal. While the Module Type Package (MTP) is getting more and more adapted in practical applications of process manufacturing, so-called skill-based manufacturing approaches are favored in the context of discrete manufacturing. The two approaches are incompatible because their models feature different contents and they use different technologies. This contribution provides a comparison of the MTP with a skill-based approach as well as an automated mapping that can be used to transfer the contents of an MTP into a skill ontology. Through this mapping, an MTP can be semantically lifted in order to apply functions like querying or reasoning. Furthermore, machines that were previously described using two incompatible models can now be used in one production process

Toward a Generic Mapping Language for Transformations between RDF and Data Interchange Formats

While there exist approaches to integrate heterogeneous data using semantic models, such semantic models can typically not be used by existing software tools. Many software tools - especially in engineering - only have options to import and export data in more established data interchange formats such as XML or JSON. Thus, if an information which is included in a semantic model needs to be used in a such a software tool, automatic approaches for mapping semantic information into an interchange format are needed. We aim to develop a generic mapping approach that allows users to create transformations of semantic information into a data interchange format with an arbitrary structure which can be defined by a user. This mapping approach is currently being elaborated. In this contribution, we report our initial steps targeted to transformations from RDF into XML. At first, a mapping language is introduced which allows to define automated mappings from ontologies to XML. Furthermore, a mapping algorithm capable of executing mappings defined in this language is presented. An evaluation is done with a use case in which engineering information needs to be used in a 3D modeling tool

Role of C-reactive protein in a murine model of vein graft disease

Abstract only availableC-reactive protein (CRP), an acute phase reactant plasma protein, plays a key role in modulating the innate immune system. Elevated plasma levels of CRP are independently associated with increased risk of thrombosis. In coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), leg veins are grafted around a coronary artery in order to divert blood flow around blocked areas of the artery. However, vein grafts can develop thrombosis, intimal hyperplasia, and atherosclerosis leading to vein graft disease (VGD). Published studies suggest that increased plasma levels of CRP are a risk factor for developing VGD. Microparticles (MP), submicron cell fragment released from apoptotic cells, promote thrombosis by increasing available surface area for clotting factor assembly. As increased plasma CRP levels can cause vascular cells to apoptose and release MP, we studied the relationship between increased plasma CRP levels, vein graft intimal hyperplasia, and MP formation in the mouse. CRP transgenic and wild type (WT) mice were used to assess the effect of CRP on VGD. Vein grafts harvested from donor mice were grafted into recipient mice and one month after surgery vein grafts were excised and processed for analysis. Planemetry was performed to measure intimal hyperplasia and samples were stained with antibodies against CRP to view the levels of the protein in each graft. MPs were separated from mouse whole blood and quantified by flow cytometry. No significant difference in neointima formation was seen between groups. CRP immunostaining suggests that CRP present in vein grafts is primarily of systemic origin. There was no significant difference in MP concentration between groups, although there was a trend for higher concentrations in CRP-Tg mice. CRP does not significantly increase intimal hyperplasia in vein graft segments or plasma MP concentration. However, sample sizes were small and further studies need to be performed to elucidate.Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Opportunity Progra

Atomic Magnetometry for the Detection of Cardio-magnetic Fields

We demonstrate a method of measuring small constant gradients on top of a large constant background magnetic field using Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT). The Earth provides a constant magnetic field of 25-50 μT, and as such, measuring much smaller magnetic fields as well as smaller gradients presents a challenge often requiring special shielding. We show that by making use of common mode noise subtraction from a dual rail setup, our measurement is insensitive to these large fields, and in theory our method does not require shielding. Our dual rail setup allows us to measure small magnetic field gradients by utilizing EIT resonances in 87Rb. In order to detect a cardio-magnetic field gradient, a magnetometer must be sensitive to gradients on the order of 10-100 pT. Our setup has been found to be sensitive to magnetic field gradients as low as 400 pT, and has the necessary bandwidth to acquire gradient fields at the rate necessary to detect features of the heart\u27s magnetic field. We also discuss potential future work that could be done to remove the necessity of shielding and produce greater sensitivity

Integration of Domain Expert-Centric Ontology Design into the CRISP-DM for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

In the age of Industry 4.0 and Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) vast amounts of potentially valuable data are being generated. Methods from Machine Learning (ML) and Data Mining (DM) have proven to be promising in extracting complex and hidden patterns from the data collected. The knowledge obtained can in turn be used to improve tasks like diagnostics or maintenance planning. However, such data-driven projects, usually performed with the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM), often fail due to the disproportionate amount of time needed for understanding and preparing the data. The application of domain-specific ontologies has demonstrated its advantageousness in a wide variety of Industry 4.0 application scenarios regarding the aforementioned challenges. However, workflows and artifacts from ontology design for CPPSs have not yet been systematically integrated into the CRISP-DM. Accordingly, this contribution intends to present an integrated approach so that data scientists are able to more quickly and reliably gain insights into the CPPS. The result is exemplarily applied to an anomaly detection use case

A Capability and Skill Model for Heterogeneous Autonomous Robots

Teams of heterogeneous autonomous robots become increasingly important due to their facilitation of various complex tasks. For such heterogeneous robots, there is currently no consistent way of describing the functions that each robot provides. In the field of manufacturing, capability modeling is considered a promising approach to semantically model functions provided by different machines. This contribution investigates how to apply and extend capability models from manufacturing to the field of autonomous robots and presents an approach for such a capability model