A Study I on the Sizing Accuracy of the Characterized Defects of the Reactor Vessel Head Penetrations

원자로헤드 관통관 결함의 검출 정확성 연구

The head penetrations for control rod drive mechanism and instrumentation systems are installed at the reactor pressure vessel head of PWRs. Primary coolant water and the operating conditions of PWR plants can cause cracking of these nickel-based alloy through a process called primary water stress corrosion cracking (PWSCC). Inspection of the head penetrations to ensure the integrity of the head penetrations has been interested since reactor coolant leakages were found at U. S. reactors in 2000 and 2001. The complex geometry of the head penetrations and the very low echo amplitude from the fine, multiple flaws due to the nature of the see made it difficult to detect and size the flaws using conventional pulse-echo UT methods. Time-of-flight-diffraction technique, which utilizes the time difference between the flaw tips while pulse-echo does the flaw response amplitude from the flaw, has been selected for this inspection for it's best performance of the detection and sizing of the head penetration see flaws. This study defines the limits of the detectable and accurately sizable minimum flaw size which can be detected by the General TOFD and the Delta TOFD techniques for circumferentially and axially oriented flaws respectively. These results assures the reliability of the inspection techniques to detect and accurately size for various kind of flaws, and will also be utilized for the future development and qualifications of the TOFD techniques to enhance the detecting sensitivity and sizing accuracy of the flaws of the reactor head penetrations in nuclear power plants.