Real-time condition monitoring of LOCA via time-frequency domain reflectometry

The maintenance of control and instrumentation (C&I) cables is crucial to safety of operating nuclear power plants. Therefore, when an accident occurs, there is a need for an accurate assessment of the impact on the cable's integrity. Unfortunately, most cable diagnostic methods are destructive and real-time assessment of the effect of accidents is not possible. Thus, in this paper, we present an analysis of a specific type of accident, a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), on C&I cables in real-time, based on time-frequency domain reflectometry (TFDR). Because the TFDR is sensitive to the signal-to-noise ratio and distortion of a reflected signal, we apply postprocessing techniques that compensate the dispersion based on the estimated propagation constant and a denoising method using singular value decomposition. The approach is verified by experimentally monitoring condition changes of localized LOCA hot spot in different C&I cables. The results are also validated by comparing with elongation at break test results.