Graphical User Interface With Reverse-Engineering of the Cyclic Voltammetry Method for Electrochemical Processes of Used Nuclear Fuel

This work focuses on an interactive reverse-engineering program design for the cyclic voltammetry (CV) method to help elucidating, improving, and providing robustness in detection analysis in the absence of complete experimental data sets during an electrorefining process of used nuclear fuel reprocessing. The work has been implemented into a Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the commercial software MATLAB allowing an individual user to directly control and make adjustments to support material detection and accountability. Analyzing and reconstructing the CV plots for uranium (U) in a LiCl-KCl molten salt at 500°C under different scan rates and at 1, 2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 wt% have been accomplished. These test values provide the current (amp) versus potential (V) and concentration of each species (mol/cm³) versus the operating time (s) graphs under different specified conditions. The computational code uses the electrochemical fundamentals coupling with various experimental values existing in the literature such as the diffusion coefficients, formal potentials, reversible/irreversible time duration for reverse engineering of the CV technique. The user needs to specify only the desired concentration of uranium and the scan rate. All other experimental data sets for each condition have been stored in the code and can be used to interpolate between the existence data. The developed routine can be used to detect the peaks at the reversible and irreversible parts despite deficiencies of experimental data in a very short run time (around one minute) with an adequate selected time interval of approximately 0.08 second. Results indicate that the model can trace the current versus potential graph with a low root-meant-square (RMS) error compared to the experimental reported in literature. The concentration of each species at the reversible and irreversible of anodic and cathodic sides can be calculated and are shown based on increasing time which provided a good view of the whole process.