Fuel assembly vibrations in nuclear reactor cores should not be excessive as these can compromise the lifetime of the assembly and lead to safety hazards. This issue is particularly relevant to new reactor designs that use liquid metal coolants. We therefore demonstrate accurate measurements of the vibrations of a fuel assembly in a lead-bismuth eutectic cooled installation with fibre Bragg grating (FBG) based sensors. The use of FBGs in combination with a dedicated sensor integration approach allows accounting for the severe geometrical constraints and providing for the required minimal intrusiveness of the instrumentation, identifying the vibration modes with required accuracy and observing the differences between the vibration amplitudes of the individual fuel pins as well as evidencing a low frequency fuel pin vibration mode resulting from the supports.

Date Published: 23 April 2017
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 10323, 25th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors, 103238C (23 April 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2265554

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10323:
25th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors
Youngjoo Chung; Wei Jin; Byoungho Lee; John Canning; Kentaro Nakamura; Libo Yuan, Editor(s)