Development of Integrity Evaluation System for CANDU Pressure Tube

CANDU 압력관에 대한 건전성 평가 시스템 개발

The pressure tube is a major component of the CANDU reactor, which supports nuclear fuel bundle and it's containment vessel. If a flaw is found during the periodic inspection from the pressure tubes, the integrity evaluation must be carried out, and the safety requirements must be satisfied for continued service. In order to complete the integrity evaluation, complicated and iterative calculation procedures are required. Besides, a lot of data and knowledge for the evaluation are required for the entire integrity evaluation process. For this reason, an integrity evaluation system, which provides efficient way of evaluation with the help of attached databases, was developed. The developed system was built on the basis of ASME Sec. XI and FFSG(Fitness For Service Guidelines for zirconium alloy pressure tubes in operating CANDU reactors) issued by the AECL, and covers the delayed hydride cracking(DHC). Various analysis methods are provided for the integrity evaluation of pressure tube. In order to verify the developed system, several case studies have been performed and the results were compared with those from AECL. A good agreement was observed between those two results.