An Intelligent Condition Monitoring Approach for Spent Nuclear Fuel Shearing Machines Based on Noise Signals.

Shearing machines are the key pieces of equipment for spent–fuel reprocessing in commercial reactors. Once a failure happens and is not detected in time, serious consequences will arise. It is very important to monitor the shearing machine and to diagnose the faults immediately for spent–fuel reprocessing. In this study, an intelligent condition monitoring approach for spent nuclear fuel shearing machines based on noise signals was proposed. The approach consists of a feature extraction based on wavelet packet transform (WPT) and a hybrid fault diagnosis model, the latter combines the advantage on dynamic–modeling of hidden Markov model (HMM) and pattern recognition of artificial neural network (ANN). The verification results showed that the approach is more effective and accurate than that of the isolated HMM or ANN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]