Abstract
In a nuclear power plant, loose part monitoring and its diagnostic technique is one of the major issues for ensuring the structural integrity of the reactor system. Typically, accelerometers are mounted on the surface of a reactor vessel to localize impact location cavsed by the impact of metallic substances on the reactor system. However, in some cases, the number of the accelerometers is not enough to estimate the impact location precisely. In such a case, one of alternative plan is to utilize another type sensors that can measure the vibration of the reactor structure even though the measuring frequency ranges are different from each others. The AE sensors installed on the reactor structure can be utilized as additional sensors for loose part monitoring. In this paper, we proposed a new method to estimate impact location by using both accelerometer signal and AE signal, simultaneously. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified by an experiment. The experimental results demonstrate that we can enhance the reliability and precision of the loose part monitoring.
