RELIABILITY PREDICTION FOR THE SQUIB VALVE OF ADVANCED PASSIVE PWR BY HARDENED TEST METHOD

摘要

The Squib valve is never used in the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) before, and it plays an important role in the advanced passive PWR accident mitigation. Thus the reliability of squib valve has received wide attention and high consideration. As a pyrotechnic mechanical device, the currently accepted approach for predicting the reliability of the squib valve requires hundreds or thousands of consecutive, successful tests of very similar components. The hardened test method for predicting the function reliability of the squib valve is presented in this paper. The squib valves are tested under hardened conditions. If they can successfully be actuated under hardened conditions, then the functional reliability under normal condition can be predicted based on the stress-strength model and one-shot product reliability assessment theory. In this way, high reliability of the squib valve can be assessed with only a limited number of tests. The hardened test method can provide considerable cost savings in testing pyrotechnical devices.