Development of automatic reactor internal vibration monitoring system using fuzzy peak detection and vibration mode decision method

In this work a method to detect the vibrational peak and to decide the vibrational mode of detected peak for internal vibration monitoring system which is particularly concerned on the core support barrel (CSB) and fuel assemblies is developed. Flow induced vibration and aging process in the reactor internals cause unsoundness of the internal structure. In order to monitor the vibrational status of core internal, signals from the ex-core neutron detectors are transformed into frequency domain. By analyzing transformed frequency domain signal, an analyst can acquire the information on the vibrational characteristics of the structure, i.e., vibration frequencies of each component, vibrational level, modes of vibration, and the causes of the abnormal vibration, if any. This study is focused on the development of the automated monitoring system. Several methods are surveyed to define the peaks in power spectrum and fuzzy theory is used to automatic detection of the vibrational peaks. Fuzzy algorithm is adopted to define the modes of vibration using the peak values from fuzzy peak recognition, phase spectrum, and coherence spectrum. (author)