<span lang="EN-US">The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor steam generators inspection system has seven modules. In this, tube locator module is a planar serial two-link robotic arm, which is used to place the eddy current probe above the steam generators tube hole in the tube sheet region. The trajectory planning of the two-link robotic arm is one of the important tasks, so the peak velocity, peak acceleration, peak jerk of various motion profiles for a given distance has to be selected properly for smooth motion and to avoid actuator saturation. The fifth-order polynomial gives lower acceleration and velocity than the jerk-limited S-curve. In this paper, the comparison of peak values of kinematic variables (velocity, acceleration, and jerk) for different motion profiles has been presented.</span>
Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) has 8 Steam Generators (SGs). Inspection of SGs requires a remote tooling to reach each of the 547 tubes. In PFBR SG, Sodium flows through the shell side and water/steam through the tube side. Degradation of the SG tubes are caused by corrosion, pitting, wear due to flow induced vibration; so it is necessary that degraded SG tube must be plugged at both ends in order to increase the availability of plant. So the plugged tubes will have some protrusion above tube sheet. As robotic device for inspection is two-axis Selective Compliant Assembly Robotic Arm (SCARA), so during movement from one tube to another tube, plugged tube has to be avoided for safe operation. In this paper path planning technique using vector algebra has been used to find out via point in the Cartesian space. The via point is selected such that robot can avoid plugged tube& ensures healthy operation of device.
The steam generator (SG) tubes of the prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR) located in Kalpakkam, India, need to be periodically inspected using the remote field eddy current (RFEC) technique. During the pre-service inspection of the SG tubes, it was found that the RFEC probes experienced
frequent mechanical breakages. To avoid these failures, changes in the existing structural design of the RFEC probe were required. A helical groove design was proposed to obtain a smooth transition in the variation of stress across the probe during the inspection. It was difficult to calculate
the flexural stiffness of the proposed helical geometry probe due to the varying cross-section along its length. In this paper, the smearing approach adopted to calculate the stiffness of the RFEC probe and the sensitivity analysis carried out to determine the optimal design of the probe are
discussed. A probe was fabricated based on the helical groove design and tested to qualify its suitability for the SG inspection. The RFEC probe with helical grooves was employed for the pre-service inspection of the SG tubes of the PFBR. More than 200 tubes have been inspected using the proposed
design and no mechanical failure of the probe has been observed.
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