The concept of an autonomous rover system to perform maintenance, investigations, and data collection in remote or inaccessible locations has seen an increased demand recently. In this work, an autonomous rover is developed to detect radioactive contamination. The rover utilizes a gas tube radiation detector as an active sensing element and onboard modules to command and control the rover, such as a GNSS receiver, Autopilot controller, and a microcontroller as an onboard controller a communication module. The rover could be controlled by a human operator or autonomous control. In both cases, the operator would be far away from the scene. The rover has many potentially valuable applications, such as radiometric survey and mapping, locating survivors, or aiding in recovering victims after a CBRN disaster. This paper discusses the concept of operations and the design of the autonomous rover.
This paper contains a comparison of several sigma-point Kalman filters, including the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), the cubature Kalman filter (CKF), and the central difference Kalman filter (CDKF). The comparison is based on a simulated electro-hydrostatic actuator, which is commonly used for flight surface actuation in aerospace systems. This brief study compares the response, convergence rate, root mean square error, the maximum absolute error, and the stability of these sigma-point Kalman filters.
The applications of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have grown in popularity due to their simplicity and availability. The quality of UAS’s performance depends usually on adding several sensors and controllers that improve accuracy and flight performance. However, this typically increases the overall cost of the system. In this paper, a technique to enhance the performance while maintaining UAS affordability is proposed. This technique involves the use of an estimation strategy to extract hidden information from only a few sensors while improving the quality of the achieved signal. The simulation results of this method show strong performance, and are compared with another well-known estimation method.
The sliding innovation filter (SIF) is a newly developed filter that shares similar principles with sliding mode observers and variable structure techniques. The SIF is formulated as a predictor-corrector method that uses the innovation or measurement error as a switching hyperplane and forces the states to remain within a region of its state trajectory. In this brief paper, the SIF is reformulated as a two-pass smoother to reduce the effects of noise and improve the overall performance. The proposed method, known as the sliding innovation smoother (SIS), is applied on an aerospace flight surface actuator, and the results are compared to the original filter.
In this brief work, a novel filtering technique that combines the newly developed sliding innovation filter with a multiple model strategy is proposed. Introduced in 2020, the sliding innovation filter is a relatively new filter used for state and parameter estimation. Based on variable structure techniques, it shares the same principles with sliding mode observers. The filter is robust and stable under system modeling uncertainties. The proposed method multiple model-based sliding innovation filter is tested on an electrohydrostatic actuator (EHA) and the results are discussed.
This brief work introduces the use of the relatively new sliding innovation filter in the field of fault detection and diagnosis. This important area is part of signal processing techniques that are widely used in industrial practice, telecommunications, optical systems, and robotics, to name a few. This filter overcomes robustness issues during faults caused by modeling uncertainties. This brief work explores the properties and quality of the filter outputs applied on an electromechanical system. The results are compared with the well-known and studied Kalman Filter.
Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) management is one of the major challenges in the nuclear power field. Several disposals, reprocessing and recycling techniques and concepts are proposed and implemented, however, the associated challenges have not been completely resolved yet. Therefore, in this work another useful application of SNF in space applications is explored. The overarching goal of this work is to explore the possibility of using nuclear spent fuel in the so-called ion-thrusters. The proposed design consists of a jet engine that utilizes the extraordinary radioactivity from SNF to ionize a propellant that is used as the thrust.
A preliminary basic design is proposed and then evaluated based on simulation predictions. MCNP is used to model a simplified design of the proposed Spent Nuclear Fuel Ion Propulsion Engine (SNIP) and estimate the ionization reaction rate and therefore the thrust exit velocity and specific impulse of the thruster.
This work introduces a monte carlo based technique powered with the ability to estimate the individual uncertainty contributions of each model parameter. The proposed technique utilizes the so-called parameter space analysis to identify the importance of influential Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) with respect to the uncertainty quantification problem. Once determined, these DoFs can be used to define and solve a linear system of equations based on linearizing the model of interest to determine the uncertainty contribution of each DoFs in conjunction with the monte carlo based samples.
This paper gives an overview about the available geothermal power plants. The second part there is a comparison between Geothermal Energy with other sources of Renewable Energy. The advantages and disadvantages of geothermal energy and power plant are discussed. Finally, a case study of a geothermal power plant located in Paris, France was simulated using System Advisor Model to observe the results. All the data input was obtained from a published research paper. Moreover, this study reviews the main functions of dry, flash and binary geothermal power plants.
Geothermal energy is one of the most attractive clean, sustainable and renewable energy sources due to its independency on weather conditions as the case for solar and wind energy. A hybrid geothermal/solar system for power production is proposed. The proposed system could be considered as highly efficient and cost-effective system. A concentrated solar thermal power generation (CSP) of type parabolic trough collector (PTC) is selected to improve the efficiency of the cycle and increase the electricity output by increasing the temperature of the incoming geothermal fluid. By using this system, the net power generation will increase up to 10% in a month compared to normal systems, and 7.6% in a year.
The Earth is made up of 71% water, but the world still has water shortage, so what is the reason? The answer to that question is that 97% of the water available is salty water, and all of it has high salt content, which makes is impossible for drinking, consuming, and irrigation. The solution for this problem is desalination, it is the only way that we can get drinkable water, other than fresh resources. But desalination usually consumes a huge amount of electricity, so other sustainable sources to help in the process of desalination in a cleaner and more cost-effective way should be considered. In this work, two main technologies for water desalination using geothermal-powered systems are presented and discussed. These technologies are promising, especially in gulf region, where geothermal energy is available generously.
Given the growing global demands on energy and fresh water, nuclear energy has become a promising source of power and freshwater production. Maximizing the nuclear power plant efficiency requires running the plant at maximum power capacity, however, the actual load might not require such huge power supply (1000 MWe +). Power plants operation with high to maximum efficiency has a profound effect on financial prices and environmental conditions for clear reasons which commands the attention towards various expensive and not efficient energy storage techniques (thermal, electrical and hydro). In this work, energy storage is substituted by a desalination plant that utilizes the excess energy to power the desalination unit. Therefore, this work explores the potential of water desalination as a proxy for energy storage systems in nuclear power plants. Various water desalination technologies are examined and compared in terms of economy, water quality and production capacity. Barakah nuclear power plant is used as a case study with APR1400 reactor design. On the desalination side, Reverse Osmosis (RO), Multi-Stage Flash (MSF), Multi-Effect Distillation (MED) and hybrid combinations are studied.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.