Remote Robotic Inspection of Irregular Surfaces on the Inner Diameter of the AECL NRU Reactor

摘要

In May of 2009, the NRU (National Research Universal) reactor was forced to shut down after a small heavy water leak. In 2009-2010 repairs were performed in order to restart medical isotope production mid-August 2010. Since the NRU vessel's return to service, a series of periodic inspections is required to ensure the safe operation of the reactor. Eclipse Scientific in collaboration with Utex Scientific Instruments and Liburdi Automation developed the NDE inspection system for the In-Service Inspection program of the NRU vessel. In addition to the difficult environmental, delivery and inspection circumstances the inspection team was faced with the problem of doing an immersion inspection of the inside surface of the reactor vessel through a small 120 mm access port at a distance of more than 10 m to the inspection area at the bottom of the reactor. The vessel was built over 50 years ago and as the inner surface was modified by the repair program during the forced outage, there were no accurate drawings of the inner surface of the vessel that an automated system could rely upon. Eclipse Scientific in collaboration with Liburdi Automation developed a robotic arm designed to enter from the remote access port to deploy the Phased Array and Eddy Current Array inspection heads into the reactor vessel. The motion control and data acquisition system was developed in collaboration with Utex Scientific Instruments using their InspectionWare software.