In-service inspection method for low-finned ferritic stainless steel tubes for new heat exchanger

Conference · Sat Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:72607

Iwai, O; Goto, M ^[1]

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1. Toshiba Corp., Yokohama (Japan)

Conventional inner eddy current test cannot obtain sufficient evaluation for low finned ferritic stainless steel tube inspection. The authors tried various methods and developed special partial saturation eddy current method. This paper summarizes typical experimental results of fundamental studies and trials, and introduces developed ECT data acquisition and evaluation system. Moisture Separator Heater (MSH) used in ABWR (Advanced Boiling Water Reactor) plant is a new type heat exchanger to increase plant thermal efficiency. There are four single tubesheet heaters in a MSH vessel. Each heater has hundreds of low finned tubes made of ferritic stainless steel. In nuclear power plants, non-magnetic materials (austenitic stainless steel, titanium, aluminum brass, etc.,) are mainly used as heat exchanger tubes such as the tubes of feedwater heater, condenser, evaporator and so on. Conventional ECT (Eddy Current Test) method are easily applied for the inspection of these heat exchanger tubes. In recent years, the authors started using ferritic stainless steel tube for new heat exchangers such as MSH because of its superior heat transfer efficiency. However, high permeability of ferritic stainless steel prevents the inspection of these tubes using conventional ECT method. To inspect MSH tubes periodically is important to confirm and maintain reliability of MSH. They tried applying various inspection methods and have developed special ECT method for low finned ferritic stainless steel tubes.

• OSTI ID: 72607
• Report Number(s): CONF-931061--; ISBN 0-87170-506-0
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
BWR TYPE REACTORS
DATA ACQUISITION
EDDY CURRENT TESTING
FERRITIC STEELS
HEAT EXCHANGERS
IN-SERVICE INSPECTION
TUBES