Mid-Term Meeting for NOMAD Consortium at Fraunhofer-Forum in Berlin, Germany

Two years after the launch of the project, the NOMAD partners came together for their second Progress Meeting in Berlin from 17-18 June 2019. The meeting was hosted by the coordinator Madalina Rabung and her colleagues from Fraunhofer. The main objective of this two-day meeting was to kick off one of the major Work Packages (‘Development of a software-based multi-parametric NDE tool’) as well as to discuss and align the scientific work and upcoming activities.

Madalina Rabung opened the meeting and gave a brief summary of the progress report recently evaluated by the EC and welcomed the new team members from HEPENIX, SVTI and CU. Members of the Scientific Advisory Board and the End-User group were also invited to join the this year’s meeting via video conference. The first meeting day continued with presentations given by the work package leaders who described the progress since last year’s project meeting in Belgium by focusing on material characterization and the interrelation of results obtained within the first hot cell campaign where six different non-destructive evaluation methods on Charpy specimen made from four western RPV base and weld materials were applied. As for the development of the NDE tool, future activities regarding the potential algorithms for building the database (e.g. data to be collected in the database or the outcome of the tool) were defined and a timeline has been set.

The second day was dedicated to a session on “How to determine the reliability of different NDE techniques regarding their future application in the field” followed by very constructive discussions. Part of this meeting day also focused on key aspects of project dissemination and communication in particular on upcoming outreach events where NOMAD results will be presented.

Overall the meeting was very successful and all participants used the opportunity to have intensive discussions and to consolidate the collaborations in the project.