Study of concrete de-bonding assessment technique for containment liner plates in nuclear power plants using ultrasonic guided wave approach

Abstract

In this work, the guided wave de-bonding area-detecting technique was studied for application to containment liner plates in nuclear power plant areas. To apply this technique, an appropriate Lamb wave mode, symmetric and longitudinal dominance, was verified by the frequency shifting technique. The S0 2.7 MHz mm Lamb wave mode was chosen to realize quantitative experimental results and their visualization. Results of the bulk wave, longitudinal wave mode, and comparison experiments indicate that the wave mode was able to distinguish between the de-bonded and bonded areas. Similar to the bulk wave cases, the bonded region could be distinguished from the de-bonded region using the Lamb wave approach. The Lamb wave technique results showed significant correlation to the de-bonding area. As the de-bonding area increased, the Lamb wave energy attenuation effect decreased, which was a prominent factor in the realization of quantitative tomographic visualization. The feasibility of tomographic visualization was studied via the application of Lamb waves. The reconstruction algorithm for the probabilistic inspection of damage (RAPID) technique was applied to the containment liner plate to verify and visualize the de-bonding condition. The results obtained using the tomography image indicated that the Lamb wave-based RAPID algorithm was capable of delineating debonding areas.