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.