Identification method of internal leakage in nuclear power plants valves using convolutional block attention module

Abstract

Valves are indispensable fluid control devices widely employed in Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) structures. Due to prolonged exposure to high-temperature environments, the internal sealing components become susceptible to thermal deformation or wear, leading to compromised sealing and potential leakage accidents in the valves. Therefore, detecting internal leakage in valves holds great significance. We propose an effective acoustic emission detection device designed for identifying internal leakage in valves within high-temperature environments. A valve internal leakage monitoring system based on the Acoustic Emission (AE) method is developed, utilizing high-temperature piezoelectric transducers as AE sensors. To efficiently and rapidly identify leakage states, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm incorporating a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is employed. The approach integrates both a channel attention module and a spatial attention module to capture global and local features, respectively. Normalized spectral data is used as the training set to optimize the CNN parameters. The performance of this method is then compared with BAM and SENET. The results indicate that CBAM can effectively enhance and suppress features by allocating weights among channels according to task requirements. Moreover, it can more efficiently identify multiple damage features under the constraints of limited computing resources.