• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.103-112
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• 2009

In a nuclear power plant (NPP), periodic sensor calibrations are required to assure sensors are operating correctly. However, only a few faulty sensors are found to be calibrated. For the safe operation of an NPP and the reduction of unnecessary calibration, on-line calibration monitoring is needed. In this paper, principal component-based Auto-Associative support vector regression (PCSVR) was proposed for the sensor signal validation of the NPP. It utilizes the attractive merits of principal component analysis (PCA) for extracting predominant feature vectors and AASVR because it easily represents complicated processes that are difficult to model with analytical and mechanistic models. With the use of real plant startup data from the Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3, SVR hyperparameters were optimized by the response surface methodology (RSM). Moreover the statistical techniques are integrated with PCSVR for the failure detection. The residuals between the estimated signals and the measured signals are tested by the Shewhart Control Chart, Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA), Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) and generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) to detect whether the sensors are failed or not. This study shows the GLRT can be a candidate for the detection of sensor drift.