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Are you looking for new business opportunities for your technology?

Do you have the radical technology needed by global players in rapidly growing sectors?

Find out what large innovation challenges these key players are facing and put forward disruptive solutions that your new and cutting edge technologies could deliver.

KTN-iX™ provides you with the opportunity to become directly linked to, or collaborate with, key industry stakeholders who are actively seeking the most innovative solutions to help them achieve their full potential.

See our latest challenges

Reducing the Amount of Reagent to Clean Pipes and Vessels

When cleaning nuclear vessels and pipework, the challenge owner seeks to reduce plant radioactivity levels by orders of magnitude, which reduces the risk and hazard for decommissioning and, in turn, lowers the lifetime costs of the redundant plants and makes the plant more economical to dismantle. This challenge is to identify a method of delivering low volumes of reagent to treat pipework walls and vessels walls rather than filling the entire pipework and vessels.

9 days left

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Detecting Residual Liquor and Sludges in Pipework and Vessels

During the decommissioning process it is important that vessels and pipework do not contain unknown volumes of liquor and / or solid materials. As such, the challenge owner is interested in assessing technologies that allow non-invasive detection of residual liquor and sludge in vessels and pipework.

9 days left

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Removing Residues from Inside Pipes and Vessels

The challenge is to identify a solution which can target, break down and mobilise solids (some maybe radioactive) which are not removed by existing cleansing practices and are adhered and ingrained to the internal surface of pipework or vessels. The solution needs to operate from the outside of the pipework or vessels.

9 days left

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Field Assessment of Granular Materials

There is a requirement to analyse samples of soil removed from the challenge owner’s site to determine the nature of all extracted material prior to disposal. The challenge is to identify a solution which can provide a field assessment measurement, ideally within four hours, for asbestos and if possible for heavy metals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), oil and explosives.

9 days left

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Disposal of Contaminated Oils

Radioactively contaminated oil wastes are a common by-product of the nuclear industry and are usually incinerated. However, where incineration is difficult to achieve, contaminated oils are stored awaiting the development of an appropriate disposal route. The challenge is to reduce the amount of stored oil by finding methods of removing particulates that may prevent incineration therefore reducing the stored waste.

9 days left

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Novel Detector(s) for Characterisation during Decommissioning

The UK nuclear industry needs to identify and quantify the nature and level of radioactivity and other hazardous materials in waste. The use of accurate data can provide significant cost savings. Current methods are time consuming and so the ability to rapidly detect and quantify contamination in-situ is greatly desired. Wood is seeking to identify techniques that can generate higher quality quantitative data (even when activity levels are low) and also a data analysis software / user interface (UI) which can combine and display the sensor data.

16 days left

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Seeing and Recording Alpha Radiation at a Distance

The detection of alpha radiation is typically limited by the proximity of the sensor to the contaminated surface (typically 1 - 2cm). A method of detecting, quantifying and providing a visual record of the location of alpha radiation (or characteristics which evidence the presence of alpha radiation) at distance (e.g. tens of centimetres to greater than 1m) is sought.

16 days left

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Using AI for Interrogating Regulatory Documents

When an engineer develops or modifies a nuclear safety case or regulation, there is a need to consider a significant and complex array of regulatory and reference material. A solution, which could include Artificial Intelligence (AI), is sought to support the engineer to increase productivity, significantly reduce the time required to produce the safety case or regulation (>50%) and increase the confidence in the proposed safety case or regulations. The challenge is to develop/offer smart systems that can look in to historical and current data/regulations, interpret a solution for the desired outcome and compile relative regulations and arguments to support.

16 days left

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Physical Asset Management in Nuclear Construction

Sellafield Ltd and EDF Energy are seeking innovative asset management solutions which will enable them to uniquely identify new assets throughout their entire lifecycles from procurement through to decommissioning. Applications are invited for technological solutions to meet this challenge.

30 days left

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Determining the density of graphite bricks

The reactor cores of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) in the UK are made up of graphite bricks. Channels run through these bricks, containing nuclear fuel, control rods and other equipment. Control rods are used to control and to shut down the nuclear reactor. Over time, the properties of the graphite bricks are modified, and these changes can contribute to determining how long a reactor can operate. One way in which the bricks change is in their density. The challenger is seeking solutions which will enable them to measure this density change over time.

43 days left

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Inspecting concealed pipework

Pipework systems within industrial power plants contain many metres of concealed pipework. Pipes may be buried, located in trenches, clad, lagged or difficult to access. This concealment of pipework makes it difficult to inspect and monitor its condition. The challenger is seeking solutions which will support existing maintenance and safety programmes and enable them to inspect concealed pipework to determine the possible presence of general or localised corrosion and to detect thinning of pipe walls.

44 days left

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