An Investigation on a Quantitative Tomographic SHM Technique for a Containment Liner Plate in a Nuclear Power Plant with Guided Wave Mode Selection

The containment liner plate (CLP) in a nuclear power plant is the most critical part of the structure of a power plant, as it prevents the radioactive contamination of the surrounding area. This paper presents feasibility of structural health monitoring (SHM) and an elastic wave tomography method based on ultrasonic guided waves (GW), for evaluating the integrity of CLP. It aims to check the integrity for a dynamic response to a damaged isotropic structure. The proposed SHM technique relies on sensors and, therefore, it can be placed on the structure permanently and can monitor either passively or actively. For applying this method, a suitable guided wave mode tuning is required to verify wave propagation. A finite element analysis (FEA) is performed to figure out the suitable GW mode for a CLP by considering geometric and material condition. Furthermore, elastic wave tomography technique is modified to evaluate the CLP condition and its visualization. A modified reconstruction algorithm for the probabilistic inspection of damage tomography algorithm is used to quantify corrosion defects in the CLP. The location and shape of the wall-thinning defects are successfully obtained by using elastic GW based SHM. Making full use of verified GW mode to Omni-directional transducer, it can be expected to improve utilization of the SHM based evaluation technique for CLP.