Development of Internet-based Cooperative System for Integrity Evaluation of Reactor Pressure Vessel

원자로 압력용기의 건전성평가를 위한 인터넷기반 협업시스템의 개발

Since early 1950's fracture mechanics has brought significant impact on structural integrity assessment in a wide range of industries such as power, transportation, civil and petrochemical industries, especially in nuclear power plant industries. For the last two decades, significant efforts have been devoted in developing defect assessment procedures, from which various fitness-for-purpose or fitness-for-service codes have been developed. From another aspect, recent advances in IT (Information Technologies) bring rapid changes in various engineering fields. IT enables people to share information through network and thus provides concurrent working environment without limitations of working places. For this reason, a network system based on internet or intranet bas been appeared in various fields of business. Evaluating the integrity of structures is one of the most critical issues in nuclear industry. In order to evaluate the integrity of structures, a complicated and collaborative procedure is required including regular in-service inspection, fracture mechanics analysis, etc. And thus, experts in different fields have to cooperate to resolve the integrity problem. In this paper, an internet-based cooperative system for integrity evaluation system which adapts IT into a structural integrity evaluation procedure for reactor pressure vessel is introduced. The proposed system uses Virtual Reality (VR) technique, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and agent programs. This system is able to support 3-dimensional virtual reality environment and to provide experts to cooperate by accessing related data through internet.