Improved Defect Detection Capability of Guided Wave Testing Boiler Spines at Heysham 1 and Hartlepool Nuclear Power Station

Abstract

Teletest Guided Wave Testing (GWT) has been used to inspect the boiler spines at EDF Energy nuclear power plants in the UK. The Teletest tool used is intended to generate and receive torsional mode waves and the operating software calculated the relevant GWT modes. Due to the complexity of the boiler spines, received responses are very complicated and quite individual across of the 32 spines under inspection. A new data processing technique called Full Wave is developed and has been used to process all Finite Element Modelling data [1], [2], showing better defect detection capability, and on real inspection data [3] shows smaller variability for measurements on an individual spine and good reproducibility across the 32 spines.