Research on Prognostics and Health Management System Technology in the Field of Nuclear Power Plant

The components of nuclear power plant will age and be damaged as the operation time increases. The maintenance of components has long implemented a maintenance system based on post-repaired and periodic maintenance at present. This maintenance method has some defects. A condition-based maintenance strategy can be achieved if the structural damage can be effectively inspected and detected to determine the appropriate maintenance strategy. This puts forward new monitoring requirements for the operation status of nuclear power plant equipment. The systems of nuclear power plant are complex and the monitoring information is huge. How to effectively inspect and detect damage of components to determine appropriate maintenance strategies is worthy of research. This paper proposes to develop a Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) system to use advanced monitoring methods to monitor the operating status and health of nuclear power plant systems and equipment, to determine whether a fault has occurred through the monitoring data, to use intelligent methods to diagnose faults, and to monitor the future operation of the system and equipment, to predict the status and remaining service life, and make maintenance and operation decisions based on the prediction results to avoid the traditional over-maintenance of ‘timed maintenance’ or the huge losses caused by ‘after-the-fact maintenance’. The PHM system of nuclear power plants includes five parts: data acquisition and processing, condition monitoring, fault diagnosis, life prediction and health management. The PHM system diagnoses the health state of the nuclear power plant, implements a state-based maintenance strategy, and reduces the maintenance cost of nuclear power operation and increase the operation life of nuclear power plant.