Electromagnetic Testing of Rod Cluster Control Assemblies in Pressured-Water Reactor Power Plants

This paper presents an electromagnetic testing system for rod cluster control assemblies used in pressurized-water reactors. The system uses several encircling-type magnetic cameras equivalent to a number of the control rods; each sensor probe composes of an encircling Hall sensor array (EHaS) and a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied sciences Vol. 9; no. 19; p. 4013
Main Authors Le, Minhhuy, Sim, Sunbo, Lee, Jinyi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.10.2019
Subjects
Assemblies
Cameras
Cladding
Control rods
Cracks
Defects
eddy current testing
Electromagnetic fields
Electromagnetic testing
Flaw detection
Grooves
Hall effect
magnetic camera
Magnetic fields
magnetic sensor array
Nuclear power plants
Power plants
Reactors
rod cluster control assembly (rcca)
Rods
Sensor arrays
Sensors
Signal processing
Spools
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Summary:This paper presents an electromagnetic testing system for rod cluster control assemblies used in pressurized-water reactors. The system uses several encircling-type magnetic cameras equivalent to a number of the control rods; each sensor probe composes of an encircling Hall sensor array (EHaS) and a bobbin coil. The EHaS has 16 Hall sensor elements that measure the electromagnetic field distribution in the radial direction of the control rod induced by the bobbin coil for defects. Experiments are performed on artificial defects on the cladding tube of real control rods to simulate short-circumferential grooves (SCGs), sliding wears (SWs), and circumferential cracks (CCs). The system can inspect the artificial SCGs, SWs, and CCs with depths up to 20%, 30%, and 40% of the cladding tube thickness (0.47 mm), respectively. Furthermore, the shape and depth of the defects could be estimated. The standard deviations of depth estimation are 18%, 5.8%, and 6.0% for CCs, SCGs, and SWs. The SCGs and SWs have a small and similar estimation error, but the CCs have the highest error of estimation, and have a small width of 0.2 mm.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app9194013