AMS Corporation wins another Phase I and Phase II SBIR award from DOE
Analysis and Measurement Services Corporation (AMS), a Knoxville-based global leader in testing the instrumentation and control systems of nuclear power plants worldwide, has been awarded its 35th Phase I and 27th Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. Both of the awards are from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The $200,000 Phase I project will be led by Will Ferrell, a Materials and Research Engineer at AMS. The research will focus on developing test methods for sensors embedded in nuclear reactor components during the manufacturing or “3D-printing” process. These technologies are critical to ensuring that advanced nuclear reactors including micro-modular reactors operate safely and efficiently. This research builds upon AMS’s extensive experience in testing instrumentation within traditional power plants.
The $1,100,000 Phase II project will be led by Brent Shumaker, a Senior Engineering Manager at AMS. This research will be a continuation of the successful Phase I project where AMS demonstrated the feasibility of developing an online monitoring (OLM) system for critical structures, systems, and components of microreactors to enable autonomous operations. During this phase of the project, AMS was able to use machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to identify data anomalies and perform diagnostics, resulting in a conceptual design for an OLM system for microreactor. During the second phase of this project, AMS engineers will work on expanding the capabilities of the technology and constructing a prototype OLM system for microreactors.
AMS was co-founded in 1977 by H.M. (Hash) Hashemian, its current president and sole owner, as a spin-off company from research efforts at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Today, AMS is a global nuclear engineering firm headquartered in West Knoxville with representatives in Austria, China, France, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
