Today’s Presentation
Program: Tour of Purdue nuclear reactor PUR-1 at West Lafayette and more
Guides: True Miller and other staff and faculty, students and new graduates
Tour Facilitated By: Linda Karwisch, Andy Ratermann, Rick Whitener
Attendance: 46 on tour
Guest(s): none noted
Scribe: Terry Ihnat
Editor: Carl Warner
Sorry – no Zoom recording of the Purdue tours.
Trip to Purdue Nuclear Reactor, Particle Accelerator and Manufacturing Lab.
PUR-1 is the country’s first reactor with a fully digital control system. The nuclear reactor initiates and controls nuclear fission reactions with neutrons initially obtained from a plutonium and beryllium source. The fuel rods of PUR-1 consist of rectangular aluminum tubes about 2 feet in length containing up to 14 flat plates of a uranium-silicide matrix encased in aluminum. They use 19% enriched Uranium instead of weapons grade 90% since a previously mandated fuel downgrade for research reactors. As you might have guessed, this was an anti-terrorism/theft safety move. When a neutron strikes an enriched uranium (U-235) atom, it causes the uranium nucleus to split into two lighter elements releasing energy and two or three more free neutrons. To help facilitate this process, graphite rods are used to reflect the neutrons.
This all happens underwater, which serves multiple purposes: cooling, radiation shielding, and water can slow down the neutrons that are formed in the fission reactions to increase their probability of performing another fission reaction. If the water gets over 70° C, it expands and is less effective at slowing down the neutrons and the reactor must be slowed or stopped and. Boron control rods are used to slow or stop the reaction. Some of the reactor’s uses are production of medical isotopes, measuring amounts of isotopes in food, dating of rocks useful in geology and other earth sciences, developing cybersecurity tools, and training the next batch of nuclear engineers.
We also visited the Build @ Scale lab where technology is developed and improved to help with production of products. They have standard mechanical machines such as lathes that are hundred years old and are still useful and productive. Their goal is to automate these via computer to achieve what they call the “lights out” scenario, one with no human on the production floor. Automated manufacturing is the goal. Of course they have modern CNC equipment as well in this huge reconfigurable space with 30 foot ceilings and a 5-ton overhead crane capable of traversing the entire length of the lab.
Indiana is the leading state in the Union for manufacturing goods. This technology can be used as a playbook for outlying and perhaps outdated manufacturers to improve their technology.
We saw the robot which is to be used for transferring materials to the machines to be processed; the robot will then pick the finished work up and take it to automated storage and, eventually, run the machines as well. That particular one, called Rosey (us old guys get that one –from the Jetsons), is sensitive to human presence and is safe to be around. There is another robot, an industrial one, which performs tasks where there must be no human nearby for safety reasons.
Other technology that was mentioned was 3-D printing, and they have multiple system types available for additive manufacturing. Also, drones are to be used for in-house materials transport and delivery of product to storage and to the areas where the product is needed -taking full advantage of the high ceiling. The example given was housing parts to be delivered to disaster sites.
We saw a machine that can perform reverse engineering with speed many times faster than without the technology. The robot driven Zeiss 3-D scanner can map tiny items up to those 2-meters in size with precision down to a very small fraction of a human hair’s width.
The third facility visited on this tour was the PRIME lab (Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory) where an 8.5 million volt tandem electrostatic accelerator (sort of like an upgraded Van de Graff generator) is used in accelerator mass spectrometry, a highly sensitive technique for measuring long-lived radionuclides. One of the differences of this unit is that charge is transported via a chain versus the typical belt. Since the unit was not in operation, access hatches were open for us to peer inside the large red-painted tank housing. We were even able to handle a sample piece of the charging chain like that visible through one of the open hatches. After the ions are accelerated, they can be fed through multiple beam lines depending on experimental goals.
Diagram source: PRIME
For further information, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4GhTFeV_lE
https://engineering.purdue.edu/NE/research/facilities/reactor
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1532/ML15329A289.pdf
https://purdueengineering.exposure.co/pur1-goes-digital
https://engineering.purdue.edu/IE/Research/gateway
https://www.physics.purdue.edu/primelab/photos/purdue-nuclear.php
https://www.physics.purdue.edu/primelab/
Some Tour Pictures
PUR-1 with lights on still showing some blue Cherenkov radiation.
PUR-1 with room lights off.
Photo: Karen Bumb
The Scientech visitors were divided into three tour groups.
This is group three in the reactor room. Photo: Betty Yan
