Abstract
The steam generator feedwater flow-rate in a nuclear power plant was estimated by means of artificial neural networks with the wavelet analysis for enhanced information extraction. The fouling of venturi meters, used for steam generator feedwater flow-rate in pressurized water reactors, may result in unnecessary plant power derating. The back-propagation network was used to generate models of signals for a pressurized water reactor Multiple-input, single-output hetero-associative networks were used for evaluating the feedwater flow rate as a function of a set of related variables. The wavelet was used as a low pass filter eliminating the noise from the raw signals. The results have shown that possible fouling of venturi can be detected by neural networks, and the feedwater flow-rate can be predicted as an alternative to existing methods. The research has also indicated that the decomposition of signals by wavelet transform is a powerful approach to signal analysis for denoising.
