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Balanced bright and dark field illumination for remote visual testing to detect cracks on pressure vessel of nuclear reactors

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A Correction to this article was published on 27 July 2021

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Abstract

Remote visual testing by video cameras is the standard process for inspecting the pressure vessel of nuclear reactors. The inspectors need to find stress corrosion cracking of around several tens of µm wide on a display monitor observed by remote wired cameras in the reactor pressure vessel filled with cooling water. The inside surface of the vessel structure has typically been blasted or grinded during its construction process for smoothing any excess weld metal, and as such, it might contain partly specular areas and partly rough areas. We found that the cracks on such surfaces are hardly distinguished from the boundary of these areas under normal scattered illumination, since the specular area reflects more of the light from the light source outside the path to the camera than the light scattered out by the rough area. To resolve this issue, we propose using two illumination light sources simultaneously, i.e., the bright field illumination and the dark field illumination, to balance the contrast to cracks from both areas. The results of experiments in a simplified condition showed that there was an improvement in the visibility of the cracks using this method.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Narishige and Mr. Oshima of Hitachi Ltd. for providing the information in Fig. 1 and about the inspection process of the pressure vessel of nuclear reactors. They also provided us the crack sample which they made with Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd. We also thank Dr. Nagashima, and Mr. Naganuma of Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd. and Mr. Miki and Mr. Hosoya of Hitachi Ltd., for the valuable discussion.

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  1. Center for Technology Innovation–Electronics and Instrumentation, Hitachi, Ltd., Research and Development Group, 1-280 Higashi-Koigakubo, Kokubunji, Tokyo, 185-8601, Japan

    Takeshi Shimano & Keiichi Betsui

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  1. Takeshi Shimano
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  2. Keiichi Betsui
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Correspondence to Takeshi Shimano.

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The original publication has been corrected due to incorrect details in Reference 3.

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Shimano, T., Betsui, K. Balanced bright and dark field illumination for remote visual testing to detect cracks on pressure vessel of nuclear reactors. Opt Rev 28, 393–402 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10043-021-00673-5

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