The Plutonium Facility, TA-55, at Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently producing NDA calibration standards used by various laboratories in the DOE complex. These NIST traceable standards have been produced to calibrate NDA instruments for accountability measurements used for resolving...

The performance of a calorimeter is usually evaluated by constructing a Shewhart control chart of its measurement errors for a collection of reference standards. However, Shewhart control charts were developed in a manufacturing setting where observations occur in batches. Additionally, the...

Nondestructive assay (NDA) of special nuclear material (SNM) involves a variety of measurement techniques, instruments, and nuclear materials. High-quality measurements require well-characterized SNM standards that represent the expected range of mass, chemical composition, and physical...

Two Canberra-built passive-active {sup 252}Cf shufflers of Los Alamos hardware and software design have been installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, one at the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) Facility at TA-3 and the other at the Plutonium Facility (PF-4) at TA-55. These instruments...

The two new shufflers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have been used on uranium inventory items that could not be previously verified or confirmed because of the lack of a suitable assay instrument. A third shufflers at the Westinghouse Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently measuring...

A major problem with cavitation in pumps and other hydraulic devices is that there is no effective method for detecting or predicting its inception. The traditional approach is to declare the pump in cavitation when the total head pressure drops by some arbitrary value (typically 3o/0) in...

Cathodolurninescence (CL) characterization in a demountable vacuum chamber is an important benchmarking tool for flat-panel display phosphors and screens. The proper way to perform these measurements is to minimize the effects of secondary electrons, excite the phosphor/screen with a uniform...

A californium shuffler originally designed to assay hollow cylindrical pieces of UA1 has been modified to assay solid cylinders. Calibration standards were characterized via chemical analysis of the molten UA1 taken during casting of the standards. The melt samples yielded much more reliable...

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) traceable standard weights serve as the foundation of mass measurement control programs. These standards are normally recalibrated annually at a cost of approximately $100 per weight. The Savannah River Site (SRS) has more than 4,000 standard...

An essential part of any measurement control program is adequate knowledge of the uncertainties of the measurement system standards. Only with an estimate of the standards` uncertainties can one determine if the standard is adequate for its intended use or can one calculate the total uncertainty...