A review of nondestructive examination technology for polyethylene pipe in nuclear power plant

Jinyang ZHENG, Yue ZHANG, Dongsheng HOU, Yinkang QIN, Weican GUO, Chuck ZHANG, Jianfeng SHI

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Front. Mech. Eng. ›› 2018, Vol. 13 ›› Issue (4) : 535-545. DOI: 10.1007/s11465-018-0515-9
REVIEW ARTICLE

A review of nondestructive examination technology for polyethylene pipe in nuclear power plant

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Abstract

Polyethylene (PE) pipe, particularly high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe, has been successfully utilized to transport cooling water for both non-safety- and safety-related applications in nuclear power plant (NPP). Though ASME Code Case N755, which is the first code case related to NPP HDPE pipe, requires a thorough nondestructive examination (NDE) of HDPE joints. However, no executable regulations presently exist because of the lack of a feasible NDE technique for HDPE pipe in NPP. This work presents a review of current developments in NDE technology for both HDPE pipe in NPP with a diameter of less than 400 mm and that of a larger size. For the former category, phased array ultrasonic technique is proven effective for inspecting typical defects in HDPE pipe, and is thus used in Chinese national standards GB/T 29460 and GB/T 29461. A defect-recognition technique is developed based on pattern recognition, and a safety assessment principle is summa-rized from the database of destructive testing. On the other hand, recent research and practical studies reveal that in current ultrasonic-inspection technology, the absence of effective ultrasonic inspection for large size was lack of consideration of the viscoelasticity effect of PE on acoustic wave propagation in current ultrasonic inspection techno-logy. Furthermore, main technical problems were analyzed in the paper to achieve an effective ultrasonic test method in accordance to the safety and efficiency requirements of related regulations and standards. Finally, the development trend and challenges of NDE test technology for HDPE in NPP are discussed.

Keywords

polyethylene pipe / nuclear power plant / ultrasonic inspection / nondestructive testing / safety assessment

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Jinyang ZHENG, Yue ZHANG, Dongsheng HOU, Yinkang QIN, Weican GUO, Chuck ZHANG, Jianfeng SHI. A review of nondestructive examination technology for polyethylene pipe in nuclear power plant. Front. Mech. Eng., 2018, 13(4): 535‒545 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-018-0515-9

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Open Access

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51575480) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2017FZA4012).Open AccessƒThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, and a link is provided to the Creative Commons license, indicating if changes were made.

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2018 The Author(s) 2018. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn
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