Development of an acoustic steam generator leak detection system using delay-and-sum beamformer

Chikazawa, Yoshitaka  

A new acoustic steam generator leak detection system using delay-and-sum beamformer is proposed. The major advantage of the delay-and-sum beamformer is it could provide information of acoustic source direction. An acoustic source of a sodium-water reaction is supposed to be localized while the background noise of the steam generator operation is uniformly distributed in the steam generator tube region. Therefore the delay-and-sum beamformer could distinguish the acoustic source of the sodium-water reaction from steam generator background noise. In this paper, results from numerical analyses are provided to show fundamental feasibility of the new method. The analysis shows that the new array system can detect a leak sound even if the background noise is as strong as the leak sound.