Development Of The Fuel Assembly Shape Size Detection System

The project is based on the actual production demand of Nuclear Power Institute of China. As for the nuclear power safety, a variety of non-destructive testing on the production of nuclear fuel assembly is required during the manufacturing operation in NPIC. Within them the nondestructive testing of overall composite dimension of nuclear fuel assembly following welding procedure is very important. To ensure the safe operation of reactor, suitable detection system is indispensable for testing the overall composite dimension of nuclear fuel assembly.In this paper, a non-contact measurement using laser displacement sensor is presented based on the characteristics of nuclear fuel assembly and optical triangulation measuring principle. Combined with the technique of laser collimation, modern sensor, precision drive, servocontrol, data acquisition, computer, etc, an automatic detection system of overall composite dimension non-contact measurement is developed.According to the requirements analysis of detecting system, an overall design proposal is determined in this paper. In addition, the hardware of the system is then described in detail. Then, assessment methods and mathematical models of form and position errors are analyzed. Least square method is used to calculate the flatness, parallelism, verticality of nuclear fuel assembly. Finally, PC software including serial communication module, data acquisition module, motion control module and data processing module made by Visual C++ 6.0 is introduced.Currently, the system has been put into actual production, and has been unanimously praised by users.