Advanced Manufacturing of Printed Melt Wire Chips for Cheap, Compact Passive In-Pile Temperature Sensors

Melt wires are a passive sensor used to determine peak temperatures during a test. Traditional melt wires are commonly used in test reactor experiments such as in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). However, the conditions within a reactor present significant challenges towards test design due to space...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:JOM (1989) 2020-10, Vol.N/A (12)
Main Authors: McMurtrey, Michael D., Fujimoto, Kiyo T., Mondal, Kunal
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advanced manufacturing
Aerosol jet printing
INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Melt-wire
Nuclear sensor
Printed sensor
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Summary:Melt wires are a passive sensor used to determine peak temperatures during a test. Traditional melt wires are commonly used in test reactor experiments such as in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). However, the conditions within a reactor present significant challenges towards test design due to space limitations and the harsh environment. For example, some test capsules have only a couple millimeters in diameter available for instrumentation, which is too small to accommodate a traditional melt wire package, and they are ultimately filled to capacity when they are immersed in molten metal. To enable instrumentation for space limited applications, peak temperature sensing capabilities paired with additive manufacturing options have been utilized to develop printed melt wires for peak irradiation temperature detection. Here, we report on the fabrication of miniaturized melt wire chips with a melting temperature ~960 °C with printed silver nanoparticle ink. This study will advance the development of unique temperature sensors capable of sensing user specified temperature ranges within the harsh environment of irradiation testing.
ISSN:1047-4838
1543-1851