Gen IV Materials Handbook FY14 Development Status Report

Abstract

This report summarizes fiscal year 2014 (FY2014) development of the Gen IV Materials Handbook (hereafter, the Handbook), a web-based database system that supports an estimated $180 million worth of reactor structural materials data collaboration among member countries of the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) Materials Project Management Board (PMB) including Canada, China, the European Union (EU), France, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, the United States (US) and Switzerland, for development of the Gen IV Nuclear Reactor Systems. To ensure global nuclear safety as an international data depository, the Handbook is developed to manage not only data, but also relations between data and background information to prevent misinterpretation and misuse of the data from different origins, languages, terminology systems and formats. Since the beginning of its business operation in FY2010, Research and Development (R&D) reports have been continuously contributed into the Handbook. However, because of common R&D report title revisions from initial planning to final completion, and further, some incomplete document transfer at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) headquarters resulting from frequent changes of incumbent PMB Technical Secretariats, delays in R&D report contribution became a noticeable issue. In FY2014, great efforts were made to improve the situation through establishing a new workflow aided by effective tools developed in the Handbook. As a result, a considerable progress was achieved and the collaboration witnessed an increase of over 60 R&D report contributions, along with cleaning up some confusing records at the NEA headquarters. With the shift of Handbook development towards the contribution of materials test data started in FY2013, the evolutionary data uploading method was proven viable for the creep test data, in which the most basic test parameters free of terminology ambiguity were first acquired to create placeholder records in the Handbook to anchor the planned contribution, then the rest of the data was collected incrementally in small groups as progress was made in translation, clarification and unification of terminologies and formats from different countries until the records were completed. In FY2014, The method was applied to pedigree and specimen data of the creep test data, with hypertext links maintaining the data relations to ensure the test data can be correctly interpreted, understood, and used with confidence. Meanwhile, evolutionary uploading of tensile test data was also initiated. To expedite materials test data contribution from the collaborating countries, a new Handbook chapter Part-K Data Packages was developed as a virtual warehouse for storing data files so that the incremental data collection may be sped up to a whole data package collection, and the collected data packages can then be processed in batch translation, clarification, and unification of terminologies and formats for evolutionary materials test data record uploading. The processed data package record will remain in the Handbook and be linked to its resulting materials test data records to serve as their data source for error check and authentication as needed in the future. To make clear requests to collaborating countries for materials test data collection, a review was initiated on all the R&D reports in the Handbook to identify collectible data. The review results will be presented at future PMB meetings for discussions on the data collection and for monitoring the data contribution. Considerable progress was achieved in Handbook graphite section development in FY2014. Five new Handbook chapters were designed and constructed to manage graphite irradiation effects, flexure, tensile and compressive, oxidation, and oxidation activation energy data respectively. These new chapters were uploaded with US data to test database schemas and functionalities. Collection and uploading of these graphite property data from the collaborating countries will follow as soon as the new chapters are proven satisfactorily functional. In near-future development, significant managerial efforts will also be required to ensure the material test data contribution while maintaining the workflow of R&D report collection.