Distributed temperature monitoring for liquid sodium leakage detection using OFDR-based Rayleigh backscattering

Ekaterina Boldyreva (1) , Romain Cotillard (1) , Guillaume Laffont (1) , Pierre Ferdinand (1) , D. Cambet (2) , J. -P. Jeannot (2) , P. Charvet (2) , S. Albaladejo (2) , G. Rodriguez (2)

1 LCFO - Laboratoire Capteurs Fibres Optiques
2 DTN - Département Technologie Nucléaire

For the first time, a gold coated single mode optical fiber has been used to detect a liquid sodium leakage on a pipe of secondary circuit pipe mock-up of nuclear fast reactor (Gen IV) by means of Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry-based on Rayleigh backscattering. During 150 min of the experiment we were able to detect and monitor the evolution of a liquid sodium leakage on the surface of the pipe.

Keywords: Optical Fiber Sensor; OFDR; Rayleigh backscattering; leakage detection; liquid sodium; fast reactor

Domains: Instrumentation and Detectors [physics.ins-det]; Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Optics [physics.optics]

Ekaterina Boldyreva, Romain Cotillard, Guillaume Laffont, Pierre Ferdinand, D. Cambet, et al.. Distributed temperature monitoring for liquid sodium leakage detection using OFDR-based Rayleigh backscattering. 9157, SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING, pp.91576N, 2014, ⟨10.1117/12.2059531⟩. ⟨cea-01828512⟩