Process Monitoring at a Reprocessing Plant Example of a weighing Cycle

A software tool to monitor nuclear material during the various unit operations of a reprocessing plant is developed, based on the PI-UDS for the data acquisition. One of the important key measurement points is the final product stage of Pu powder product. Here the dosage of the final Pu powder is for safeguards and safety reasons of high importance. The cyclic behavior of the weighing scale is therefore closely monitored in order to account with high precision for the final product quantity. The output signal of the weighing scale shows very steep variations. To ensure a correct interpretation by the analyzing software a special data acquisition and compression algorithm was applied. This algorithm collected in a triggered manner a sufficient amount of data points at each steep variation, while it reduced sufficiently the number of registered points in the smooth slope region. The data acquisition and compression algorithm was successfully implemented as NT-service and validated at the reprocessing plant in La Hague. An example of a complete weighing scale cycle is presented