A Study on the Leakage Characteristic Evaluation of High Temperature and Pressure Pipeline at Nuclear Power Plants Using the Acoustic Emission Technique

An acoustic leak monitoring system(ALMS) using acoustic emission(AE) technique was applied for leakage detection of nuclear power plant's pipeline which is operated in high temperature and pressure condition. Since this system only monitors the existence of leak using the root mean square(RMS) value of raw signal from AE sensor, the difficulty occurs when the characteristics of leak size and shape need to be evaluated. In this study, dual monitoring system using AE sensor and accelerometer was introduced in order to solve this problem. In addition, artificial neural network(ANN) with Levenberg.Marquardt(LM) training algorithm was also applied due to rapid training rate and gave the reliable classification performance. The input parameters of this ANN were extracted from varying signal received from experimental conditions such as the fluid pressure inside pipe, the shape and size of the leak area. Additional experiments were also carried out and with different objective which is to study the generation and characteristic of lamb and surface wave according to the pipe thickness.