Abstract
As the fleet of nuclear power plants (NPPs) approach their1 original qualified life (typically 40 years) and operators seek license extensions, regulators require assurance that they can continue to operate safely in the decades to come. Some of the most important, yet often overlooked components, are the cables that provide the signal paths for instrumentation and control (I&C) systems used to ensure safe and efficient operation of NPPs.In response to this, the authors explore the use of expanding indenter modulus (IM), an industry-accepted technique for cable condition monitoring, into a prognostic tool for predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of I&C cables. Not only is this technique non-destructive, but it can be performed while NPP cables are in service, thus making it practical for adoption into existing cable condition monitoring programs. In this paper, the authors describe an accelerated aging cable test bed used to acquire several types of measurement parameters as cables age. Additionally, practical techniques are described in which simple IM measurements can be leveraged for condition monitoring and RUL estimation.Error analysis indicates the proposed method is superior to conventional RUL estimation techniques, such as simple trending and curve fitting. The authors demonstrate that using IM can potentially provide a non-destructive, in-situ estimation of RUL for I&C cables. As described in this paper, the IM data clearly shows trends as a function of cable age, and shows promising performance for RUL estimation especially compared with conventional techniques.
Highlights
As existing nuclear power plants begin to operate beyond their initial design lifetimes, it becomes increasingly important for plant engineers and operators to be able to monitor aging and degradation of critical plant equipment and components
EAB is being used as a reference for the cable end-of-life, whereas the focus of this research is the general behavior of indenter modulus (IM) data as a function of cable age as well as its performance as a prognostic parameter for remaining useful life (RUL) estimation
Note that these figures represent the average of five individual EAB measurements per aging time, and the error bars represent the standard error
Summary
As existing nuclear power plants begin to operate beyond their initial design lifetimes, it becomes increasingly important for plant engineers and operators to be able to monitor aging and degradation of critical plant equipment and components. The following details the results of performing prognostic analysis on data collected from accelerated aging of instrumentation and control (I&C) cables, and uses this data to empirically assess the use of a non-destructive. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PROGNOSTICS AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT mechanical measurement known as indenter modulus (IM) for the prediction of cable RUL. After summarizing the details of the accelerated cable aging experiment and results, the data is used to perform RUL estimations. An analysis and discussion of the results of the selected RUL methods is presented, as well as an estimation of the error present in each method
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