Development of a Whole Container Seal
- ORNL
This paper outlines a technique for utilizing electrically conductive textiles as a whole container seal. This method has the potential to provide more robustness for ensuring that the container has not been breached versus conventional sealing methods that only provide tamper indication at the area used for normal access. The conductive textile is used as a distributed sensor for detecting and localizing container tamper or breach. For sealing purposes, the conductive fabric represents a bounded, near-infinite grid of resistors. The well-known infinite resistance grid problem was used to model and confirm the expected accuracy and validity of this approach. An experimental setup was built that uses a multiplexed Wheatstone bridge measurement to determine the resistances of a coarse electrode grid across the conductive fabric. Non-uniform resistance values of the grid infer the presence of damage or tears in the fabric. Results suggest accuracy proportional to the electrode spacing in determining the presence and location of disturbances in conductive fabric samples. Current work is focused on constructing experimental prototypes for field and environmental testing to gauge the performance of these whole container seals in real world conditions. We are also developing software and hardware to interface with the whole container seals. The latest prototypes are expected to provide more accuracy in detecting and localizing events, although detection of a penetration should be adequate for most sealing applications. We are also developing smart sensing nodes that integrate digital hardware and additional sensors (e.g., motion, humidity) into the electrode nodes within the whole container seal.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1147715
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Annual Meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management, Atlanta, GA, USA, 20140720, 20140724
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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