Detection and prediction of thimble tube defects using artificial neural networks

The reliability of thimble tubes plays a critical role for maintaining the safety of a nuclear power plant. The defect depth needs to be quantified and predicted to support the operational decision-making. This paper presents a method to quantify the defects on thimble tube wall based on the analyzation of eddy current testing (ECT) data. Then, a method using artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the detect depth is studied. The tubes are divided into 2 shapes and four regions according to their positions and the data of each region and each shape is expanded by mean interpolation. A prediction model based on ANN is constructed for each shape in each region. The experimental results show that the model can predict the signal of the next year according to the signal of the previous three years with mean absolute percentage error less than 16%.