Some developments in core-barrel vibration diagnostics

Diagnostics of core-barrel motion, and notably that of beam mode vibrations, has been usually performed by two distinct concepts. One strategy is to perform a qualitative analysis in the time domain, using descriptors such as vibration trajectory, probability distributions etc. This approach is rather realistic in the sense that it allows for general anisotropic pendular vibrations. The other strategy is to use frequency analysis with the goal of quantifying certain vibration properties. However, this second approach could so far handle only isotropic and unidirectional vibrations. In this paper we propose a unification of these two approaches by introducing a model by which general anisotropic vibrations can be quantified in the frequency domain. However, when separating the noise components prior to the frequency analysis, we suggest the use of symmetry properties of the noise in the time domain, based on reactor physics assumptions, as opposed to the earlier methods that use statistical independence of the components. Due to the unified approach, a combination of time and frequency domain analysis methods can be used for presentation and maximum information extraction. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.