Monitoring sodium circuits and ACSR cables using fiber optic sensors

Raman Distributed Temperature Sensors (RDTS) are attractive for the monitoring of coolant loop systems in nuclear power plants and monitoring of overhead power transmission lines. This paper discusses deployment of RDTS on double walled pipelines of primary sodium circuits in Fast Breeder Reactors (FBR). It is demonstrated as a proof-of-concept on a test loop with water as the leaking medium. Path delay multiplexing is adopted to improve the spatial resolution from 1.02 m to 0.5 m. A second application focuses on the influence of environmental factors on the detectability of defects in the ACSR cables using RDTS.