Visualization On Fouling Data Of Steam Generator Tubes

The development of data visualization technology provides a new idea for the maintenance and overhaul of steam generators in nuclear power plant. The 3D visualization of the fouling data measured at heat transfer tubes of steam generators can not only provide the precise sludge distribution on the various locations, but also help technicians conduct the eddy current inspection for heat transfer tubes, which offer valuable information for sludge quantity evaluation and sludge washing.In the existing process of inspecting and cleaning sludge on the heat transfer tubes of steam generators, the maintenance personnel need to use dedicated cleaning tools to clean the individual transfer tubes with a large quantity. Usually, the steam generator is composed of thousands of heat transfer tubes in certain distribution patterns, and the length of each heat transfer tube is quite long. Therefore, these cleaning methods are very cumbersome and clumsy, and take a lot of maintenance and overhaul time, which is not conducive to the production. In addition, the diameters of heat transfer tubes are quite small and they have some bending parts. So maintenance personnel are extremely apt to damage the heat transfer tube during maintenance with cleaning tool, which is a disadvantage for production efficiency improvement.In order to improve the efficiency of overhauling and cleaning the sludge on heat transfer tubes of steam generator, this thesis proposes a method based on sludge data visualization system, which help the personnel to conduct the work of maintaining and overhauling the equipments. In order to build the system, Based on the investigation on the requirements for the sludge inspection and cleaning, a sludge data management structure is designed and several sludge visualization modules for steam generator heat transfer tubes are developed. Furthermore, the classical Marching Cube algorithm for three-dimensional volume data visualization is studied and applied to the overall sludge data visualization, which achieves a good effectiveness in showing the 3D spatial distribution of the slimes on heat transfer tubes.Based on the above research, this paper presents some visualization algorithm of steam generators sludge data visualization. Through the user-application development on the 3D graphical platform Hoops, a software system with functions of sludge data management and sludge visualization for steam generator tubes is developed. Through comparison with the detection data of steam generator tubes, the effectiveness of the sludge visualization is validated. The experimental results show that the sludge data visualization function greatly benefits the steam generator maintenance and its sludge clean-up.