Stochastic Nondestructive Testing Simulation: Sensitivity Analysis Applied to Material Properties in Clogging of Nuclear Powerplant Steam Generators

A nondestructive testing procedure is currently used to estimate the clogging of tube support plates in French nuclear powerplant steam generators. A stochastic approach has been applied to the finite-element electromagnetic field simulation to evaluate the impact of material properties uncertainties on the monitoring signal. The polynomial chaos expansion method makes it possible to easily derive the Sobol decomposition which measures how much the variability of each input parameter affects the model output.