Unlike wireless signals, Argonne’s new secure acoustic technology can travel along metallic piping within nuclear power plants, which could eventually help engineers communicate better in extreme environments.
Argonne nuclear scientists Sasan Bakhtiari (NSE) and Alexander Heifetz (NSE) received the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology in late May.
The award recognizes the scientists’ discovery of a new way to send digital information on metallic pipes in nuclear power plants using ultrasonic waves. Why communicate using pipes? Because the thick concrete walls in nuclear power plants tend to interrupt wireless signals. The new technology takes advantage of a plant’s existing metal pipes, a vital step that avoids the need for further approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“We are excited to be recognized by our peers and also contribute meaningfully to the nuclear community,” said Heifetz, who, along with Bakhtiari and Richard Vilim (NSE), filed for a patent of the approach in 2018.
The team has since used the approach to move data, including digital images, on high-temperature nuclear-grade metallic pipes using ultrasonic transducers. (Transducers convert electrical signals to mechanical pressure signals, which move along pipes as elastic waves.)
Xin Huang and Jafar Saniie of the Illinois Institute of Technology shared the award with Argonne scientists. The work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Enabling Technology Advanced Sensors and Instrumentation program.
For more background on how the technology works, see Realizing a ‘pipe dream’.
By Dave Bukey (CPA)