en.Wedoany.com Reported - Russia's high-tech seamless stainless steel pipe manufacturer CYBERSTEEL recently announced that it has developed and applied a new cold rolling process for steam generator heat exchange tubes in nuclear power plants, significantly reducing geometric noise (pilger noise) in non-destructive eddy current testing, enabling the produced heat exchange tubes to meet stringent reliability and safety requirements.
Steam generator heat exchange tubes serve as the critical barrier connecting the radioactive primary circuit coolant and the safe secondary circuit steam. Their integrity directly determines the nuclear safety and radiation safety of the nuclear power plant, and they are also the components with the largest metal consumption and highest stress in the steam generator. When rolling heat exchange tubes on traditional cold rolling mills, uneven rolling thickness creates microscopic topography on the inner surface of the tubes, leading to increased geometric noise in non-destructive eddy current testing, making it difficult to detect actual defects that affect tube integrity during operation.
Engineers at the CYBERSTEEL R&D center developed a new rolling method for austenitic stainless steel heat exchange tubes. By selecting appropriate combinations of tube rotation angles at different positions of the cold rolling mill stand, micro-protrusions are formed on the inner surface of the tubes, thereby minimizing noise to the greatest extent, while also optimizing the groove geometry. Thanks to the company's in-house tooling workshop, experts were able to rapidly produce tooling with superior surface quality. The final rolled tubes fully comply with the strict requirements of the TU 14-3R-197-2001 standard.
Vyacheslav Maltsev, Technical Sales Director of CYBERSTEEL, stated that obtaining the patent is a natural result of the company's systematic work in the R&D field. The R&D center focuses on developing new high-tech piping and systematically improving product performance, with some tasks originating from internal quality improvement programs and others from customer demands. In knowledge-intensive industries such as nuclear energy, one cannot wait for market demand to emerge; one must be proactive.
Currently, the method developed by CYBERSTEEL has been applied to the mass production of steam generator tubing for VVER-440, VVER-1000, and VVER-1200 pressurized water reactor nuclear power plants, with the company producing approximately 1,600 kilometers of such tubing annually.
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