INES: 3D Eddy Current Imaging for a Nondestructive Evaluation System Applied to Steam Generator Tubes

Abstract

<p>Nuclear power plants supply about 80% of the total production of electricity in France. Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) is of prime importance in verifying the soundness of components such as the steam generator (SG), casted elbows, core, etc. In order to facilitate diagnostic, now mainly performed through signal processing and human interpretations, we attempt to image damaged internal structures of these components through data inversion. This NDE inverse approach, similar to medical imaging, was successfully applied to radiographic NDE of casted elbows. From a few number of projections (less than 10) and after rough localization of defects, our software SIROCCO3D is able to reconstruct 3D images of flaws using ART and markovian inverse algorithms [1].</p>