• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.46-52
• /
• 2019

This work proposes a noncontact ultrasonic transducer for detecting wall-thinning of containment liner plates of nuclear power plants by measuring their thickness without physical contact. Because the containment liner plate is designed to prevent atmospheric leakage of radioactive substances under severe nuclear accident, its wall-thinning inspection is important for safety of nuclear power plants. Wall-thinning investigation of containment liner plates have been carried out by measuring their thickness with contact-type ultrasonic thickness gauge by inspectors and needs a lot of time and cost. As an alternative, an electromagnetic acoustic transducer measuring precisely thickness of containment liner plates without any physical contact or couplant was suggested in this research. A transducer generating and measuring shear ultrasonic waves in thickness direction was designed and wave field produced by the transducer was analyzed to verify the design. The working performance of the suggested transducer was tested with carbon steel plate specimens with various thicknesses. The test result shows that the proposed transducer can measure thickness of the specimens precisely without any couplant and implies that swift scanning of wall-thinning of containment liner plates will be possible with the proposed transducer.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.36 no.5
• /
• pp.370-376
• /
• 2016

Corrosion on the surface of a structure can generate cracks or cause walls to thin. This can lead to fracturing, which can eventually lead to fatalities and property loss. In an effort to prevent this, laser imaging technology has been used over the last ten years to detect thin-plate structure, or relatively thin piping. The most common laser imaging was used to develop a new technology for inspecting and imaging a desired area in order to scan various structures for thin-plate structure and thin piping. However, this method builds images by measuring waves reflected from defects, and subsequently has a considerable time delay of a few milliseconds at each scanning point. In addition, the complexity of the system is high, due to additional required components, such as laser-focusing parts. This paper proposes a laser imaging method with an increased scanning speed, based on excitation and the measurement of standing waves in structures. The wavenumber of standing waves changes at sections with a geometrical discontinuity, such as thickness. Therefore, it is possible to detect defects in a structure by generating standing waves with a single frequency and scanning the waves at each point by with the laser scanning system. The proposed technique is demonstrated on a wall-thinned plate with a linear thickness variation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.34 no.5
• /
• pp.349-355
• /
• 2014

Wall thinning defects can occur in the pressure vessels used in a variety of industries. Such defects are related to the flow velocity. Considering the fact that such vessels constitute up to 70 or 80% of the plant structures in a power plant, it is important to measure internal defects as part of a safety evaluation. In this study, optical measurement were applied in a non-destructive evaluation using shearography to ensure the safety and improve the reliability of a power plant through the non-contact, non-destructive evaluation of pressure vessels. In order to verify whether the pressure vessels contained faults, experimental and analytical investigation were conducted to measure any internal defects and out-of-plane deformation from inner temperature changes and pressure changes in the piping of the circulation system. The most important factors in this research were the thickness, width, and length of a defect. An increase in these could confirm an increase in the deformation. Thus, internal defects in a pressure vessel were measured using shearography, which made it possible to ensure the reliability and integrity of the pipe.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.1-13
• /
• 2018

The proportion of natural gas-fueled power generation is expanding due to the change of domestic energy policy pursuing reduction of dust and increasing clean energy consumption. Natural gas fuels used for the combined-cycle power plants and the district-heating power plants are operated at high temperature and high pressure in the fuel supply system. Accidents due to leakage of the gas such as fire and explosion should be prevented by applying risk management techniques. In this study, risk assessment was performed on the natural gas fuel supply system of a combined power plant based on the API RP 581 RBI code. For the application of the API RBI code, lines and segments of the evaluation target system were identified. Operational data and input information were analyzed for the calculations of probability of failure and consequence of failure. The results of the risk assessment were analyzed over time from the initial installation time. In the code-based evaluation, the gas fuel supply system was mainly affected by thinning, external damage, and mechanical fatigue damage mechanisms. As the operating time passes, the risk is expected to increase due to the external damage caused by the CUI(Corrosion Under Insulation).

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.35 no.5
• /
• pp.291-298
• /
• 2015

An array type probe for monitoring metal tubes is proposed in this paper which utilizes peak value and peak time of a pulsed eddy current(PEC) signal. The probe consists of an array of encircling coils along a tube and the outside of coils is shielded by ferrite to prevent source magnetic fields from directly affecting sensor signals since it is the magnetic fields produced by eddy currents that reflect the condition of metal tubes. The positions of both exciter and sensor coils are consecutively moved automatically so that manual scanning is not necessary. At one position of send-receive coils, peak value and peak time are extracted from a sensor PEC signal and these data are accumulated for all positions to form an array type peak value signal and an array type peak time signal. Numerical simulation was performed using the backward difference method in time and the finite element method for spatial analysis. Simulation results showed that peak value increases and the peak appears earlier as the defect depth or length increases. The proposed array signals are shown to be excellent in reflecting the defect location as well as variations of defect depth and length within the array probe.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.32 no.4
• /
• pp.410-417
• /
• 2012

Currently domestic thermal and nuclear power plants are comprised of many type's condenser and steam generator tubes to produce the electricity of good quality. There are some methods to inspect these tubes in the event that several defects were discovered in these facilities. Among many non-destructive methods, we used guided wave to inspect the soundness of tubes, because this method is very fast to detect the defect and very simple to install the equipment and also, can inspect up to the long range at a fixed point. Also, this method has a drawback that does not detect a very small size defect. So, we made an effort to overcome this drawback through the experimentation and signal analysis according to the size and shape of the defect through the manufacture of various artificial cracks capable to generate within the small size tube in the study and we anticipate that these detect limits can be overcome along with the development of the signal processing and manufacturing technology of the sensor for the inspection.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
• /
• v.61 no.3
• /
• pp.419-425
• /
• 2023

This paper presents the research results of analyzing the high-temperature corrosion characteristics of three currently commercialized heat exchanger tube materials under actual operating conditions of a biomass power plant. In order to precisely analyze the high-temperature corrosion characteristics of these materials, a high-temperature corrosion evaluation device was installed in the power plant equipment, which allows for adjusting the surface temperature of the heat exchanger tubes. Experiments were conducted for approximately 300 hours under various temperature and operating conditions. In this study, the commercialized heat exchanger tube materials used were SA213T12, SA213T22, and SA213T91 alloys. In order to objectively analyze the high-temperature corrosion characteristics of each material, an international standard-based process to remove corrosion products was applied to obtain the weight change of the specimens, and the average thickness loss and corrosion rate were derived. Thus, the high-temperature corrosion results for each condition were quantitatively compared and analyzed. In addition, in order to increase the reliability of the high-temperature corrosion evaluation method introduced in this study, the surface and cross-sectional corrosion of the specimens were confirmed by using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis. Based on these analysis results, it was found that the corrosion resistance of the commercial heat exchanger materials increases as the content of chrome and nickel in the composition increases. Additionally, it was found that the corrosion phenomenon is rapidly accelerated as the surface temperature increases. Finally, the replacement period (lifetime) of the heat exchanger tubes under each condition could be inferred through this study.