Progress towards prognostic health management of passive components in advanced small modular reactors

Sustainable nuclear power to promote energy security and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are two key national energy priorities. The development of deployable small modular reactors (SMRs) is expected to support these objectives by developing technologies that improve the reliability, sustain safety, and improve affordability of new reactors. Advanced SMRs (AdvSMRs) refer to a specific class of SMRs and are based on modularization of advanced reactor concepts. Prognostic health management (PHM) systems can benefit both the safety and economics of deploying AdvSMRs and can play an essential role in managing the inspection and maintenance of passive components in AdvSMR systems. This paper describes progress on development of an experimental setup for testing and validation of PHM systems for AdvSMR passive components. The experimental set-up for validation of prognostic algorithms is focused on thermal creep degradation as the prototypic degradation mechanism. The test bed enables accelerated thermal creep aging of materials relevant to AdvSMRs along with multiple nondestructive evaluation (NDE) measurements for assessment of thermal creep damage. NDE techniques include eddy current, magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN), and linear and non-linear ultrasonic measurements. Details of the test-bed design as well as initial measurements results for specimens at different levels of thermal creep damage are presented.