Development of wall thinning screening system and its application to a commercial nuclear power plant

Abstract

A new non-destructive evaluation (NDE) method has been developed for metal pipes for the detection wall thinning. The method has been showed to be suitable for applications to electric power generation plants where flow accelerated corrosion (FAC) of carbon steel piping is a significant cause of increased maintenance and plant personnel casualty. The wall thinning screening system (WalSS) was developed in two major phases. In the first phase, the equipotential switching direct current potential drop (ES-DCPD) method was developed for piping wall (Ryu et al., 2008a, 2010). In the second phase, in this paper, a quantitative detection criteria was developed. The relative ES-DCPD change of 3.8% has been defined as the screening criteria for wall thinning schematization. This criteria means that the component with measured ES-DCPD change greater than 3.8% is called for a more comprehensive examination. In the criteria development, all variables were taken into consideration based on commercial plant piping inspection data such as initial thickness distributions, wall thinning shape and nominal thickness. The developed WalSS based on ES-DCPD was applied to a moisture separator reheater (MSR) drain line of a commercial nuclear power plant (NPP) during a scheduled overhaul. The measured ES-DCPD change was 2.16%, which is lower than the ES-DCPD criteria, identifying the pipe having adequate wall thickness. This is confirmed by site thickness inspection using ultrasonic technique (UT).