PC based helium leak detection system for NFC, Hyderabad

All the natural uranium fuel elements used in Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) are subjected to helium leak test before making the fuel bundles. However before packing the fuel bundles for dispatch to the reactor plants, each and every fuel bundle is passed through the helium leak test to ensure the highest level of leak tightness of the sheath. For this purpose PC based helium leak detection system has been developed to overcome the manual method of performing leak test and to use the capability of Helium Leak Detection Unit (HLDU) to be controlled via any IBM compatible PC (AT 486 or above). This system will help to increase the speed of measurement, logging of leak rate and other parameters and provides various reports in desirable format for documentation. The data stored can be used for analysis purpose. 1 fig