Doo-Byung Yoon

IMPROVEMENT OF CROSS-CORRELATION TECHNIQUE FOR LEAK DETECTION OF A BURIED PIPE IN A TONAL NOISY ENVIRONMENT

The cross-correlation technique has been widely used for leakage detection of buried pipes, and this technique can be successfully applied when the leakage signal has a high signal-to-noise ratio. In the case of a power plant, the measured leakage signals obtained from the sensors may contain background noise and mechanical noise generated by adjacent machinery. In such a case, the conventional method using the cross-correlation function may fail to estimate the leakage point. In order to enhance the leakage estimation capability of a buried pipe in a noisy environment, an improved cross-correlation technique is proposed. It uses a noise rejection technique in the frequency domain to effectively eliminate the tonal noise due to rotating machinery. Experiments were carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method. The results show that even in a tonal noisy environment, the proposed method can provide more reliable means for estimating the time delay of the leakage signals.

MASS ESTIMATION OF IMPACTING OBJECTS AGAINST A STRUCTURE USING AN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK WITHOUT CONSIDERATION OF BACKGROUND NOISE

It is critically important to identify unexpected loose parts in a nuclear reactor pressure vessel, since they may collide with and cause damage to internal structures. Mass estimation can provide key information regarding the kind as well as the location of loose parts. This study proposes a mass estimation method based on an artificial neural network (ANN), which can overcome several unresolved issues involved in other conventional methods. In the ANN model, input parameters are the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the auto-power spectrum density (APSD) of the measured impact acceleration signal. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated through application to a large-sized plate and a 1/8-scaled mockup of a reactor pressure vessel. The results are compared with those obtained using a conventional method, the frequency ratio (FR) method. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of estimating the impact mass with 30% lower relative error than the FR method, thus improving the estimation performance.

Loose-part Mass Estimation Using Time-frequency Analysis

Mass estimation was derived as functions of acceleration magnitude and primary frequency. The conventional method of mass estimation used frequency data directly in the frequency domain. The signals that can be obtained sensor contained noise as well as impact signal. Therefore, how well we can detect the frequency data in noise directly determines the quality of mass estimation. To find exact frequency data, we used time-frequency analysis. The time-frequency methods are expected to be more useful than the conventional frequency domain analyses for the mass estimation problem on a plate type structure. Also it has been concluded that the smoothed WVD can give more reliable means than the other methodologies for the mass estimation in a noisy environment.

Monitoring Pipe Thinning Using Time-frequency Analysis

Pipe thinning is one of the major issues for the structural fracture of pipes of nuclear power plants. Therefore a method to inspect a large area of piping systems quickly and accurately is needed. In this paper, we proposed the method for monitoring pipe thinning. Our basic idea come from that a group velocity of impact wave is different as wall thickness. If the group velocity is measured, wall thickness can be estimated. To obtain the group velocity, time -frequency analysis is used. This is because an arrival time difference can be measured easily in time-frequency domain rather than time domain. To test the performance of this technique, experiments have been performed for a plate and U type pipe. Results show that the proposed technique is quite powerful in the monitoring pipe thinning.

Development of an Integrated Management System for Maintenance Parameters and Rotary Machine of Hydro-power Plant

Condition-based maintenance(CBM) has been used as a useful concept for optimizing maintenance plan and decreasing maintenance cost in several kinds of plant sites. This study introduced an example that developed an integrated management system for maintenance parameters and hydraulic turbine of hydro-power plant in order to improve its maintenance strategy as applying CBM techinique. The integrated management system consists of three parts. One is a hardware part including PDA inspection system and several kind of precision measuring instruments. Another is a vibration monitoring system on hydraulic turbine. The other is a software part that takes charge of making hierarchy tree of maintenance parameters and their inspection route, managing accumulated database, assessing health condition of components, and supporting interface with other enterprise management system. The system has been installed at Chuncheon hydro-power plant for test and demonstration. It is expected that the system can contribute database construction for diagnostics and prognostics on facility health condition and systematic accumulation of know-how on operation and maintenance of plant.

A Study on Leak Detection Technique of a Pipe In a Noisy Environment

The importance of the leak detection of a buried pipe in a power plant of Korea is being emphasized as the buried pipes of a power plant are more than 20 years old. The objective of this work is to enhance the capability of the leak detection technique in a noisy environment. For this purpose, a modified cross-correlation method that can effectively remove the rotating machinery noise component is suggested. In addition, a method for leak point detection using phase information of cross-spectrum is suggested. The validity of the proposed method is verified by performing an experiment. The experimental result demonstrates that the performance of the cross-correlation method can be enhanced by reducing the periodic noise components due to mechanical equipment.

AN IN-SITU YOUNG’S MODULUS MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUE FOR NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS USING TIME-FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

Elastic wave is one of the most useful tools for non-destructive tests in nuclear power plants. Since the elastic properties are indispensable for analyzing the behaviors of elastic waves, they should be predetermined within an acceptable accuracy. Nuclear power plants are exposed to harsh environmental conditions and hence the structures are degraded. It means that the Young’s modulus becomes unreliable and in-situ measurement of Young’s modulus is required from an engineering point of view. Young’s modulus is estimated from the group velocity of propagating waves. Because the flexural wave of a plate is inherently dispersive, the group velocity is not clearly evaluated in temporal signal analysis. In order to overcome such ambiguity in estimation of group velocity, Wigner-Ville distribution as the time-frequency analysis technique was proposed and utilized. To verify the proposed method, experiments for steel and acryl plates were performed with accelerometers. The results show good estimation of the Young’s modulus of two plates.

Monitoring Pipe Thinning Using Two Accelerometers

In this paper, we estimated the degree of pipe thinning by using two accelerometers. It uses measured velocity of flexural wave traveling along the pipes. If the thickness of the wall decreases because of pipe thinning, flexural stiffness of the pipes decreases and accordingly, traveling velocity of flexural wave decreases. Thus, if we install two vibration sensors outside of the pipes and measures traveling velocity of flexural waves regularly, we can estimate and monitor the degree of pipe thinning quickly. In order to test the method we experimented with pipes, and get the result that group velocity varies according to the degree of pipe thinning. It verified this method can be used to monitor the pipe thinning.

NOISE SOURCE IDENTIFICATION IN A REVERBERANT FIELD USING SPHERICAL BEAMFORMING

Identification of noise sources, their locations and strengths, has been taken great attention. The method that can identify noise sources normally assumes that noise sources are located at a free field. However, the sound in a reverberant field consists of that coming directly from the source plus sound reflected or scattered by the walls or objects in the field. In contrast to the exterior sound field, reflections are added to sound field. Therefore, the source location estimated by the conventional methods may give unacceptable error. In this paper, we explain the effects of reverberant field on interior source identification process and propose the method that can identify noise sources in the reverberant field.

AN ENHANCED REFLECTION REMOVAL TECHNIQUE AND ITS APPLICATIONS

Electroacoustic transducers using piezoelectric materials are popular in various applications such as underwater acoustics, ultrasound, earthquakes and elastic wave propagations. Especially, they are widely used in non-destructive testing for ultrasonic or acoustic emission transducers. In general, they generate and receive waves through media to find meaningful targets or physical characteristics of materials. However, in most uses, the media are bounded with finite dimensions, therefore there are multiple transmitting paths reflected from the boundaries. Such reflections corrupt the principal path signal to be analyzed. To overcome this problem, gating technique to gate successively transmitting and receiving signals, in other words, tone-burst signal technique, is most representatively used. This basically isolates the direct signal before the arrival of reflected signals in the time domain, and therefore it is also described as time windowing or time-selective windowing techniques without loss of generality. These techniques have inherent overlap problems invoked by long pulse duration, especially slightly damped signals or low frequency waves. An enhancement technique of shortening the pulses by digital filtering is proposed and successively applied in practical uses. It can isolate the principal path signal from reflected signals. Thereafter the signal can be perfectly recovered after removing reflections.