Abstract

Research Project PIONIC - Program for Investigation Of NDE by International Collaboration

PIONIC continues the performance investigations of current and emerging NDE procedures and techniques conducted in the former research programs PINC (International Program for Inspection of Nickel-alloy Components) and PARENT (Program to Assess the Reliability of Emerging Nondestructive Techniques). The overall goal of these international activities between the United States, Sweden, Finland, Korea, Japan and Switzerland was and is to quantify the NDE-effectiveness for detection and characterization of simulated stress corrosion cracks (SCC). Therefore, series of open and blind international round-robin tests (RRTs) on dissimilar metal weld (DMW) mockups with different geometries containing artificial SCCs were performed including commercial vendors, laboratories and universities. The applied procedures and inspection techniques were evaluated applying the "hit-miss"-probability of detection (POD) approach. To extend the flaw population for the performance evaluation, the use of artificial SCCs created by modeling and simulation will be investigated besides the manufacturing of real stress corrosion cracks. Both sources serve to update the POD-calculation and therefore the performance evaluation with a larger flaw database. Based on the developed procedure, a nuclear-specific guideline for performing POD-analyses for NPP-components inspections will be developed. In addition, the analysis of NDE-data will be supported by artificial intelligence. A project overview and some insights of the current research will be presented.