Development of integrated automatic diagnosis method for loose parts monitoring system

Generally, it is known that loose parts in the reactor coolant systems (RCS) bring serious damage into the system components and impede the normal function of the system. So, it is necessary to rapidly respond when the impact event has occurred. This paper presents a realization of automatic diagnosis algorithm for LPMS (Loose Parts Monitoring System) and application results to the impact test data at YongGwang Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 (YGN3), Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4 (KNU4) and the real data at YongGwang Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 (YGN1). The integrated diagnosis algorithm is composed of three parts; prefiltering, impact location and mass estimation. The prefiltering is needed to reject low frequency background noises. To estimate the impact location, the starting points of impact are detected from the filtered signals and compared to produce the time differences, and then the modified triangular method is applied. To estimate the mass and energy of a loose part, we automatically compute the maximum amplitude and the initial half period. Additionally, a modified impact theory considering amplitude and energy attenuation effects is applied.

To show the effectiveness of the proposed diagnostic method, the real impact test data at YGN3, KNU4 and the real impact data at YGN 1 is used. The analysis results show that the location estimation error is on average below 7.5%, and the average mass estimation is within 40%.