R&D and Safety Analysis Department

The R&D and Safety Analysis Department provides research and engineering support to the Company's design activities. It carries out analyses and experiments to justify the safety and performance of the equipment and technologies. The department has 16 experts to include two PhDs and three research fellows and candidates.

The duties are:

• Monte Carlo calculations to justify nuclear safety,
• Monte Carlo or engineering calculations to prove radiation safety,
• SNF isotopic composition analysis,
• design analysis of equipment structures under static, seismic, cyclic, and dynamic load,
• calculations to select kinematic chain elements (reduction mechanisms, gears, etc.),
• thermal and hydraulic studies,
• preparation of safety analysis reports,
• experimental research to verify computer gas-dynamic and thermophysical models of the equipment under development,
• setup and support to experiments and research of thermophysical properties of materials, the corrosion behavior of ceramic materials in aggressive high-temperature gaseous media, the behavior of zirconium alloys during high-temperature oxidation,
• setup and support to experiments and research of a hydrogen release induced by radiolysis and a radioactive release during wet SNF storage, development of methods for computation of kinetics of hydrogen accumulation,
• setup and support to experiments and research of an airborne release during handling damaged spent fuel,
• experimental studies of efficiency of dust-trapping equipment,
• analytical support to the equipment development to select structural materials, process parameters, and evaluate engineering solutions.

Experiments on full-scale specimens verify many of the calculation data.

To do the jobs, the department has all the necessary resources available, i.e.

• application-specific software certified by the Federal Environmental, Industrial and Nuclear Supervision Service of Russia (MCU-RFFI/A, MMKFK-2, ANSYS Mechanical, ANSYS Fluent, LS-Dyna, Scale 6.1–6.2, Origen ARP, etc.). Moreover, the Sosny R&D Company has access to the specific software through cooperation with the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Data Bank,
• a high-performance computing cluster based on GPU NVIDIA TESLA units with a total performance of 50 Tflops,
• trained and skilled staff authorized to perform safety analysis. Every one of them has at least one university degree in the relevant field of activity,
• necessary experimental equipment based on certified measurement tools and procedures.

The staff take part in industry-specific academic workshops and conferences and publish articles in scientific periodicals.