Poor control of steam generator water level is the main cause of unexpected shutdowns in nuclear power plants. Such shutdowns are caused by violation of safety limits on the water level and are common at low operating power where the plant exhibits strong nonminimum phase characteristics. In addition, the steam generator is a highly complex, nonlinear and time-varying system and its parameters ...

Previous work [1] has shown that MEMS technology has significant potential to create more compact, higherperforming hardware for chemical oxygen iodine lasers (COIL). In COILs, the laser medium is a flowing gas that must be pumped through the system at high mass flow rates to ensure proper system operation. As a result, compact pumps with high pumping rates are a key element of the COIL system....

Poor control of steam generator water level is the main cause of unexpected shutdowns in nuclear power plants. Particularly at low powers, it is a difficult task due to shrink and swell phenomena and flow measurement errors. In addition, the steam generator is a highly complex, nonlinear and time-varying system and its parameters vary with operating conditions. Therefore, it seems that design o...

Most electric power is produced by steam turbines. This is because the steam cycle is well suited to the conversion of heat to work and steam turbines can be built in a wide range of capacities up to about 1500 MW. Steam turbines are basically very simple having fixed blades to accelerate the steam and moving blades to absorb the resulting kinetic energy. The moving blades are mounted on a rota...

In nuclear power plants, the main corrosion product that is deposited on the outside of steam generator tubes is porous magnetite. The objective of this study was to simulate porous magnetite that is deposited on thermally treated (TT) Alloy 690 steam generator tubes. A magnetite layer was electrodeposited on an Alloy 690TT substrate in an Fe(III)-triethanolamine solution. After electrodepositi...

An adaptive genetic-simplex algorithm for parameter optimization in nuclear power plant is proposed by using adaptive crossover and mutation techniques and integrating genetic algorithm with simplex algorithm. The modified algorithm enables the handing of nonlinear constrained optimization problem because of dramatically improved search capability. Performance comparison between the proposed al...

Steam generator tube integrity is critical for the safety and operability of pressurized water reactors. Any degradation and rupture of tubes can have catastrophic consequences, e.g., release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Given the risk significance of steam generator tube ruptures, it is necessary to periodically inspect the tubes using nondestructive evaluation methods to detect and c...

A new cogeneration installation was in the process of being commissioned when severe subsynchronous vibration was detected on the generator during no load tests. Subsequently, two rotordynamics problems were discovered. These problems prohibited the steam turbine generator set from reaching full speed. Additional vibration problems were anticipated once the generator was loaded and the steam fl...