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Disney World should have gone nuclear
There is extra significance to the American Nuclear Society holding its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, this past week. That’s because in 1967, the state of Florida passed a law allowing Disney World to build a nuclear power plant.
Sarah Miele, Pranav Karve, Sankaran Mahadevan (Vanderbilt Univ), Vivek Agarwal (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 976-982
In this work, we investigate the suitability of a novel dynamics-based method, namely vibroacoustic modulation (VAM), for the detection and localization of cracks caused by the alkali-silica reaction (ASR). ASR is a chemical reaction between the cement and certain aggregates containing amorphous silica. In a VAM test, the structural component is excited using two frequencies. The frequency modulation (and hence the nonlinear structural behavior) appears as sidebands around the higher (probing) frequency in the linear spectrum (LS) of the measured response in the neighborhood of the damage zone. A map of the magnitude of such sidebands can be used to detect and localize the damage [1]. We perform laboratory experiments to investigate VAM-based damage diagnosis in thick concrete components. We describe laboratory testing on a cement slab containing four pockets of reactive aggregates placed at known locations. Our experiments show that VAMbased testing with optimized test parameters and suitable sensor density can potentially be used to detect and localize cracks in thick concrete structures.