Optical coherence tomography for nondestructive evaluation of fuel rod degradation
- AREVA, Inc., 3315 Old Forest Road, Lynchburg, VA 24501 (United States)
Nuclear power plants regularly inspect fuel rods to ensure safe and reliable operation. Excessive corrosion can cause fuel failures which can have significant repercussions for the plant, including impacts on plant operation, worker exposure to radiation, and the plant's INPO rating. While plants typically inspect for fuel rod corrosion using eddy current techniques, these techniques have known issues with reliability in the presence of tenacious, ferromagnetic crud layers that can deposit during operation, and the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) inspection results can often be in error by a factor of 2 or 3. For this reason, alternative measurement techniques, such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), have been evaluated that are not sensitive to the ferromagnetic nature of the crud. This paper demonstrates that OCT has significant potential to characterize the thickness of crud layers that can deposit on the surfaces of fuel rods during operation. Physical trials have been performed on simulated crud samples, and the resulting data show an apparent correlation between the crud layer thickness and the OCT signal.
- OSTI ID:
- 22391218
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1650, Issue 1; Conference: 41. Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation, Boise, ID (United States), 20-25 Jul 2014; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
GENERAL PHYSICS
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CORRELATIONS
CORROSION
EDDY CURRENTS
FAILURES
FUEL RODS
IN-SERVICE INSPECTION
LAYERS
NONDESTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS
NUCLEAR FUELS
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
REACTOR OPERATION
RELIABILITY
THICKNESS
TOMOGRAPHY