Ensa assisted to the 12th General Assembly of CEIDEN

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Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E assisted to the 12th General Assembly of the Nuclear Fission Energy Technology Platform held at the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

During the session, the latest developments regarding energy policy were discussed and the main technical programmes of the platform were presented, among which the analysis of national investments in nuclear R&D+i corresponding to 2016 stood out. It also hosted the conference «The Integrated Energy Network» held by representatives of the Electric Power Research Institute .

The objectives of CEIDEN, of which Ensa has been a member since its beginnings in 2007, are to coordinate the different national R&D plans and programmes, as well as participation in international programmes, trying to coherently guide the efforts of the entities involved.

The Cantabrian company was represented by Luis Magdalena, coordinator of R&D Improvements and Javier Matarredona, from the Marketing and Sales Department.

 

Ensa welcomes ENUSA President

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Ensa welcomes ENUSA President

Maliaño, October 22, 2018 – Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E received the visit of José Vicente Berlanga, president of ENUSA INDUSTRIAS AVANZADAS, S.A., S.M.E , who was accompanied by Pablo Zuloaga, Government delegate in Cantabria.

Eduardo González-Mesones, president of the Cantabrian company; Rafael Triviño, general manager and Ángel Cosío, director of Human Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility, explained some of the most relevant aspects of the company’s activity focused on the design and manufacture of large components for the nuclear industry, spent fuel management and which provides different services in the plant covering its entire life cycle, including dismantling.

During his visit to the workshop, Berlanga was able to gain first-hand knowledge of some of the equipment currently in different stages of manufacture and showed special interest in the fuel heads of the Spanish nuclear power plants that Ensa has been supplying to ENUSA since 1998. «I have been able to verify in situ that a Spanish company such as Ensa is a technical reference in the manufacturing of components for such a demanding sector as the nuclear sector», he declared.

For its part, Zuloaga valued this meeting very positively and expressed its commitment to visit the facilities of the company based in Maliaño on another occasion and in greater detail.

SEPI Group

Both companies belong to the SEPI Group, Ensa 100% owned and ENUSA 60% owned, a holding company that covers a total of 15 public companies directly and majority owned, with more than 74,000 professionals. It also has a supervised public foundation and minority direct shareholdings in nine other companies and indirect shareholdings in more than one hundred companies.

Ensa successfully completes the loading campaign at the Ascó II Power Plant

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Maliaño, 19th October 2018.- Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E successfully completed the loading of 2 casks at the Ascó nuclear power plant in Tarragona.

With this work, the Cantabrian company has completed the loading campaign this year for a total of 6 casks; 4 in group I between March and April and 2 in  group II between September and October.

In addition to the loads, Ensa received 4 new casks manufactured by the company itself, two of which were used for Group II.

Ensa develops a new submerged arc welding system

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Maliaño, October 17, 2018 – The Automatic unit belonging to the Advanced Technology Centre of Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E , in collaboration with the Welding Development unit and the Production Welding Unit, has designed a new submerged arc welding system that is being used in the union of parts that make up the Lower-Port of the PS4 of ITER .

This new advance allows welding inside the component whose complex geometry makes the joining process difficult, thus achieving significant improvements in the quality of the welds in compliance with the standards required by ITER.

Ensa participated in the SNE meeting with two conferences to present its advances in the ITER project and in the automation of the measurement of tube plate hole diameters

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Maliaño, 11th October 2018.- Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E participated in the 44th annual meeting of the Spanish Nuclear Society with two presentations. The first one to present its advances in the ITER project and the second one focused on the automation of the measurement of tube plate hole diameters.

Sofia Corino, in charge of the Special Projects area, presented the latest novelties related to the assembly of the ITER vacuum chamber, as well as the validation of the prototypes developed.

Her, presentation was divided into two blocks to explain, on the one hand, the scope of Ensa within this project of international importance, as well as the challenges and technical difficulties that must be overcome, among which the limitation of space and access stands out. On the other hand, she talked about the prototypes already developed and the advance of their validation on the 1:1 models.

Domingo Lima, head of Ensa’s Advanced Technology Center , spoke about «Automation of the measurement of tube plate diameter holes».

In this sense, he explained that during the manufacture of the steam generators the drilling of the Tube Plate is carried out and that the difficulty in the quality control of these holes has made necessary the development of a new system and the improvement of the methodology to make the inspection in an automated and more efficient way.

Some of the advances of this robotic system are:

– Guarantee of 100% inspection of the holes.

– Calculation of measurements in real time without further processing.

– Registration of the acquired data.

– Automatic generation of reports with all measurements and non-conformities.

– Adaptable to all types of geometries.

– Improved productivity.

– Reliability of the system.

Ensa participated in the Nuclear South West Conference in Bristol

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Maliaño, October 8, 2018 – Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E participated in the Annual South West Nuclear Conference held in Bristol where the state of the construction works of the Hinkley Point C power plant was explained and a description of the nuclear supply chain in the United Kingdom was given, as well as several platforms and organizations and success stories of companies that are collaborating in the Hinkley Point project.

For the Cantabrian company, attending this event was a «great opportunity to establish contacts with potential partners and obtain more information about possible business opportunities in the British market».

Ensa, within a group of technologists, winner of the «Secretary’s Honor Awards – Achievement Award»

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The Cantabrian company was nominated in May 2018 for an R&D project on its ENUN32P cask.

Maliaño, 04 October 2018.- Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E in collaboration with other national and international technologists -Enresa and Enusa, the American laboratories: Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and several South Korean organizations , has finally won the «Secretary’s Honor Awards – Achievement Award» granted by the Department of Energy of the Government of the United States of America for an R&D project to study the behaviour of spent fuel elements transported in its ENUN 32P dual-purpose, storage and transport cask, and verify the calculations made during the design.

U.S. laboratory Sandia led this international data collection test during an eight-month triathlon to quantify the accelerations and vibrations and deformations experienced by uranium oxide rods from a simulated spent fuel element during transportation by rail, ship and truck. Its analysis revealed that the accelerations and deformations were well below the resistance limit of the irradiated fuel.

The award recognizes the contribution of this equipment to the benefit of U.S. society and represents the highest non-monetary recognition that can be received.

Other entities that have received this prestigious award have been the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NASA.

 

Ensa’s Advanced Technology Center develops a robotic lateral welding system forged bars to inner shell

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The Automatic unit belonging to the Advanced Technology Centre of Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E has developed a robotic welding system for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor , by means of an industrial robot and control and welding equipment developed by this unit.

The system allows welding with pulsed current on both sides of a piece, alternating beads according to the needs of the process and with it optimum results are obtained in vertical ascending welding.

With this development , Ensa remains at the forefront of mechanised welding, satisfying the most demanding needs of today’s nuclear market.

The robotic welding system developed at Ensa completes the work on the first Splice Plates set of the Vacuum Vessel model for ITER

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The robotic welding system developed at the Center for Advanced Technology of Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E concluded the work of the first Splice Plate set of the 1/1 model that represents the Vacum Vessel of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor , which is being developed in the workshops that the company has in Maliaño, as part of the order received from Iter Organization at the end of 2012.

The main objective in this phase of the project is to design and verify that the equipment and developments carried out are suitable for the work that will later be done in the installation phase in Cadarache. One of the key activities is welding, and for this reason the validation of the robotic welding system has begun, welding the first set of splice plates that act as joining pieces between the two sectors of the 1/1 model. The method used is based on an integrated robotic system conceived in the Automatic department of the CTA for the tracking of trajectories generated from 3D scans of the pieces.

In the case of ITER, the 3D model of the splice plates is used together with the data provided by the dimensional control of the robot positions. All this information is previously loaded into the system at the disposal of the welders at the operation station, which allows the joint to be selected by its reference as well as controlling and recording the operation parameters throughout the process.

Another important aspect of the system designed, has to do with the protection gas, since the particular characteristics of the sectors, the backup gas system can only provide protection in a very localized way, so a module was included in the control system that allows to coordinate the movement of the robot with that of the backup system and thus achieve that the area covered by the gas is always below the zone of incidence of the current.

Once the first batch of splice plates has been completed, a second batch will continue which, if necessary, will allow new functions to be added to the system and new improvements to be introduced that could be identified with the aim of continuing to improve the process.

Ensa successfully loads 4 casks in the ATI of the Ascó NPP

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Equipos Nucleares S.A., S.M.E successfully completed the loading of four spent fuel casks in Group I of the Ascó Nuclear Power Plant in Tarragona. The casks were duly positioned in the independent spent fuel storage installation of this plant.

Loading was carried out between February and May in collaboration with Enwesa S.A., S.M.E., a subsidiary of Ensa. The forecast for 2018 for the Ascó plant is to complete the load of 2 additional units in Group II foreseen for the third quarter of the year.

The main functionality of this system is the dry storage of the fuel in the plant. The Cantabrian Company has previously manufactured this type of containers for the same site and expects to participate in future loading campaigns for the Ascó y Vandellós Nuclear Association based on its experience and satisfactory results.