Nuclear Power Plants Safety and Maintenance
1Mechanical Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
2Department of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada
3Pressure Boundary Section, AMEC, Nuclear Safety Solution Ltd., Toronto, ON, Canada
Nuclear Power Plants Safety and Maintenance
Description
Extensive preventive maintenance, inspection, and monitoring programs are developed to ensure that nuclear power plants are operating under safety and reliability conditions. These programs involve safety analysis codes, equipment health monitoring, degradation-specific inspections, and Plant Lifecycle Management (PLM). Although extensive effort has been invested to develop such programs, nuclear power plants continue to experience problems, and hence, more accurate analysis and related research work still receive a great attention. This is mainly because the unresolved safety problems or lack in systems monitoring often causes significant safety-related events at nuclear power plants. Therefore, demand for applied research work continues to grow in order to mitigate such events, increase the plant capacity factor, and gain public support to new build of nuclear power plants as an alternative power source.
The objectives of this special issue are (1) to present multidisciplinary research topics on nuclear power plants maintenance, inspection, and safety, (2) to provide insights and advice to nuclear power plant management practitioners to enable more strategic perspectives in the selection and implementation of operations capabilities.
The following list of potential topics is provided to stimulate ideas for topics. However, authors are not restricted to this list, but submissions must provide relevant and practical insights framed by the previously mentioned research motivations. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Component reliability and materials degradation
- On-line monitoring techniques in nuclear power plants
- Power plants inspections devices and methodology
- Plant operations, maintenance, and engineering modifications
- Outage and preventative maintenance
- Structural integrity evaluations
- Seismic and vibration analyses
- Instrumentation and controls
- Reactor safety analysis
- Thermal-hydraulic codes for reactor safety
- Fluid-structure interactions
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/stni/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/stni/nppsm/ according to the following timetable: