Autonomous robot designed to inspect nuclear power plant piping for corrosion

摘要

A research team at the d'Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Cambridge, Massachusetts) is developing small robots that will swim through cooling water pipes in a nuclear power plant and check for signs of corrosion.According to Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of MIT's dArbeloff Laboratory, one of the major challenges for safety inspectors in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) nuclear power plant is identifying corrosion in the primary cooling cycle. Currently, plant inspectors use methods to monitor piping such as direct current voltage gradient (DCVG) surveys to identify areas where pipe coatings may have degraded and ultrasonic testing (UT) to locate cracks. Monitoring may require digging up buried pipes and visually inspecting them, which can be time consuming and costly.