Optimal Sparse Sensor Placement with Adaptive Constraints for Nuclear Digital Twins*

Nuclear applications lack the luxury of immersing the physical asset with a large number of sensors due to cost constraints, harsh conditions and physical inaccessibility. Thus, optimal sensor placement with spatial constraints is an important design consideration to enable flow field reconstruction and digital twinning of nuclear assets. Design considerations may include preset sensor locations, blocked regions of a reactor, or a fixed number of sensors within a user-specified region or a user-specified distance from other sensors. The developed algorithm handles optimal sensor placement by incorporating these spatial constraints into a well-established greedy algorithm for the optimal sensor placement problem. It is capable of providing sensor locations on a grid based on user-defined constraints and can be expanded to various applications such as climate science and fluid dynamics. In this work the algorithm is demonstrated on the Opti-TWIST (Transient Water Irradiation System) prototype which is electrically heated to mimic the neutronics effect and will be inserted into the Transient Reactor Test facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).