Obiettivo
The safe operation of the 450 nuclear power plants around the world and 210 in Europe depends on the regular in-service inspection of the reactor pressure vessels, which contain the nuclear fuel. Reactor Pressure Vessels (RPVs) which house the fuel of a nuclear power plant are made of thick steel sections welded together. This steel becomes brittle with age and is therefore more susceptible to the rapid growth of cracks.
These RPVs contain water under high pressure and are particularly susceptible to a process known as 'stress-corrosion cracking'. Current methods of inspection have major drawbacks because:
- They require large and heavy robots costing millions of Euros. In most cases these robots require the use of a central mast manipulator and insertion of this mast is a difficult and time-consuming operation, requiring the use of the Plant's polar crane and causing disruption to other activities during the plant outage thus increasing time of inspection.
- These require several large inspection sensors placed in complex "probe pans" to inspect large areas. The probe pans have to be changed several times thus increasing time of inspection.
- They can sometimes miss defects or wrongfully size them. All the above current drawbacks mean that large amounts of time consuming manual intervention is required during inspection thus requiring operators to work in radiation hazardous areas. This also increases inspection time, which carries a huge economic cost.
To overcome the above drawbacks this project satisfies an urgent need to develop new and novel inspection methods, which can speed up inspection times, improve defect detectability and reduce operator exposure to dangerous radiation whilst working inside the reactor containment.
Campo scientifico (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifica i progetti con EuroSciVoc, una tassonomia multilingue dei campi scientifici, attraverso un processo semi-automatico basato su tecniche NLP. Cfr.: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifica i progetti con EuroSciVoc, una tassonomia multilingue dei campi scientifici, attraverso un processo semi-automatico basato su tecniche NLP. Cfr.: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- scienze naturaliinformatica e scienze dell'informazionesoftware
- ingegneria e tecnologiaingegneria elettrica, ingegneria elettronica, ingegneria informaticaingegneria elettronicasistemi di controllo
- ingegneria e tecnologiaaltre ingegnerie e tecnologieingegneria nucleare
- ingegneria e tecnologiaingegneria elettrica, ingegneria elettronica, ingegneria informaticaingegneria elettronicasensori
- ingegneria e tecnologiaingegneria ambientaleenergia e carburanti
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Argomento(i)
Invito a presentare proposte
FP6-2002-SME-1
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Meccanismo di finanziamento
Cooperative - SMEs-Co-operative research contractsCoordinatore
CAMBRIDGE
Regno Unito