Field Application of Ultrasonic Inspection System for Stay Welds at Steam Generator of KSNP

한국표준형 원전 증기발생기 Stay 용접부 자동검사시스템 및 현장 검증

The stay cylinder weld at the steam generator of Korean Standard Nuclear Power Plants is safety class I component and is subjected to be inspected by the volumetric examination such as ultrasonic method. As accessibility of this area is limited due to the narrow space and high radiation, the existing manual inspection method involves various difficulties. Moreover operators may be exposed to internal contamination by contaminated dust during the surface buffing process to improve the inspection reliability of this area. Recently the new automatic inspection system for stay cylinder welds has been developed. The inspection system basically consists of a driving assembly, data acquisition device and signal processing units. The driving assembly is classified by 1) the scanner for inspecting and buffing the weld, 2) pillars for guiding the scanner and 3) the base frame for loading and supporting pillars. The scanner has 4 sensor modules to inspect in 4 refracted angles and 4 incident directions. These components can be inserted into the skirt of the stay cylinder through the manway hole and assembled easily by one-touch in the skirt. Data acquisition device and signal processing units developed in previous works are also newly upgraded for better processing of data analysis and evaluation. The system has been successfully demonstrated not only in the mock-up but also in the field. In this paper, newly developed inspection system for the stay cylinder weld of the steam generator is introduced and their field applications are discussed.