Development of neutron-proof ultra-high-performance concrete
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The increasing demand for high-performance radiation shielding materials in nuclear infrastructure, medical facilities, and industrial radiography applications has intensified interest in advanced radiation shielding concrete. Herein, we present the development of a novel, sustainable, Neutron-Proof Radiation Shielding Ultra-High-Performance Concrete ( NP-RS-UHPC ) by harnessing the separate and synergistic effects of silica sand, magnetite, and ferroboron on neutron shielding performance. NP-RS-UHPCs were designed by coupling particle packing and response optimizations to achieve optimum flowability, density, compressive strength, and neutron shielding performance. NP-RS-UHPCs with up to 50 % improvement in fast-neutron removal cross-section were developed. Ferroboron-rich NP-RS-UHPCs exhibited thermal-neutron absorption cross-sections exceeding 3000 % of those in magnetite- and silica-sand-only systems while distinctly manifesting what we define as the Neutron Absorption Saturation Threshold ( NAST ), which marks a characteristic material thickness where nearly all absorbable thermal neutrons are captured. A bivariate exponential decay model was developed to predict thermal-neutron transmission in Ferroboron-rich NP-RS-UHPC. Results confirmed NP-RS-UHPC’s potential to deliver both improved mechanical performance and multi-spectrum radiation shielding efficiency, demonstrating its suitability for neutron-rich environments including small modular reactors. • A novel neutron-proof UHPC was developed for neutron-rich environments like SMRs. • Thermal neutron attenuation in UHPC was experimentally evaluated for the first time. • A bivariate exponential model was developed to predict neutron attenuation. • Borated UHPC reached what we define as the Neutron Absorption Saturation Threshold (NAST). • NAST marks the thickness where nearly all absorbable thermal neutrons are captured.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it