Development of Acoustic Leak Detection and Localization Methods for Inlet Piping of Fugen Nuclear Power Plant

The development work carried out on Fugen NPP is focused on detection of a small leakage on the reactor's inlet feeder pipes at an early stage by an acoustic leak detection method with usage of high-temperature resistant microphones. Specifically, the leak rate of 0.046 m 3 /h has been chosen a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of nuclear science and technology 2004-02, Vol.41 (2), p.183-195
Main Authors: SHIMANSKIY, Sergey, IIJIMA, Takashi, NAOI, Yosuke
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
acoustic monitoring
Applied sciences
ATR Fugen
coolant leakage
correlation matrix
Energy
Energy. Thermal use of fuels
Exact sciences and technology
Fission nuclear power plants
Installations for energy generation and conversion: thermal and electrical energy
leak detection
leak localization
leakage sound
microphone
multi-channel processing
wavelet decomposition
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Summary:The development work carried out on Fugen NPP is focused on detection of a small leakage on the reactor's inlet feeder pipes at an early stage by an acoustic leak detection method with usage of high-temperature resistant microphones. Specifically, the leak rate of 0.046 m 3 /h has been chosen as a target detection capability for this system. A cross-correlation technique has been studied for leak detection under low signal-noise ratios. The study shows that the sound diffusion on piping causes distortion of leak signals that results in their low correlation. A leak-location estimator and multi-channel correlation value, associated with estimated leak position, have been employed to detect such low-correlated leak signals. A method based on cross-correlation of signal spectral components has been proposed to deal with non-stationary leak signals. Joint-Time-Frequency-Analysis has been applied to analyze such signals, whilst a Wavelet decomposition technique has been used to extract their short-term spectral fluctuations. Since the spectral components are less affected by signal distortion, they provide higher correlation value and can be applied for leak detection under lower signal-noise ratios. The possibility of detecting and locating a small leakage by the methods proposed has been demonstrated by a number of simulation tests conducted on the Fugen NPP site.
ISSN:0022-3131
1881-1248
DOI:10.1080/18811248.2004.9715475