Multilevel modeling of diametral creep in pressure tubes of Korean CANDU units

In this work, we applied a multilevel modeling technique to estimate the diametral creep in the pressure tubes of Korean Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) units. Data accumulated from in-service inspections were used to develop the model. To confirm the strength of the multilevel models, a 2-level multilevel model considering the relationship between channels for a CANDU unit was compared with existing linear models. The multilevel model exhibited a very robust prediction accuracy compared to the linear models with different data pooling methods. A 3-level multilevel model, which considered individual bundles, channels, and units, was also implemented. The influence of the channel installation direction was incorporated into the three-stage multilevel model. For channels that were previously measured, the developed 3-level multilevel model exhibited a very good predictive power, and the prediction interval was very narrow. However, for channels that had never been measured before, the prediction interval widened considerably. This model can be sufficiently improved by the accumulation of more data and can be applied to other CANDU units.