Machine Recognition of Abnormal Behavior in Nuclear Reactors

Abstract

A multivariate statistical pattern recognition system for reactor noise analysis is presented. The basis of the system is a transformation for decoupling correlated variables and algorithms for inferring probability density functions. The system is adaptable to a variety of statistical properties of the data, and it has learning, tracking, updating, and dimensionality reduction capabilities. System design emphasizes control of the false-alarm rate. Its abilities to learn normal patterns and to recognize deviations from these patterns were evaluated by experiments at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) High-Flux Isotope Reactor. Power perturbations of less than 0.1 percent of the mean value in selected frequency ranges were readily detected by the pattern recognition system.