TOPICS

Rinako Yokoyama (M2), Department of Nuclear Engineering and Management, won "Outstanding presentation award" and “CG award” at AESJ Annual Meeting in Autumn, 2020

 

 


〈Name of award and short explanation about the award〉
"Outstanding presentation award"
It was given for the superior presentation by students at this conference.

"CG award"
It was given for the superior visualization at this conference.

About awarded research〉
The powder mixing process in the production of nuclear fuels requires a homogeneous mixing of fuel powder and additives. Authors performed powder simulation of a mixer called a container blender by the DEM / SDF method, which models the wall boundary with the Signed Distance Function (SDF) in the Discrete Element Method (DEM). Sensitivity analysis was performed on the rotation speed of the container blender, the angle of the rotation axis, and the number of particles, and the optimization of each parameter and the mixing mechanism were considered. As a result, it was found that the mixing speed could be accelerated by increasing the rotation speed, but when it was too fast, the mixing did not proceed due to centrifugal force. It was also found that the smaller the angle of the axis of rotation, the faster the mixing proceeded, because the effect of shear mixing became stronger. It was found that the smaller the number of particles, the faster the mixing proceeded, and the cause was that the influence of diffusion mixing became stronger. And as for the number of particles, the mixing proceeded faster with the small number of particles. It was thought that this was because the influence of diffusion mixing worked strongly.

〈Your impression & future plan〉
It is my great honor to win these award simultaneously. I really thank Prof. Mikio Sakai for his excellent supervision, and I also thank all members of my laboratory. I will keep researching hard and try to improve our research.