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The acoustic detection of defects or leaks inside a cylindrical shell containing a fluid is of prime importance in the industry, particularly in the nuclear field. This paper examines the beamforming technique which is used to detect and locate the presence of an acoustic monopole inside a cylindrical elastic shell by measuring the external shell vibrations. In order to study the effect of fluid-structure interactions and the distance of the source from the array of sensors, a vibro-acoustic model of the fluid-loaded shell is first considered for numerical experiments. The beamforming technique is then applied to radial velocities of the shell calculated with the model. Different parameters such as the distance between sensors, the radial position of the source, the damping loss factor of the shell, or of the fluid, and modifications of fluid properties can be considered without difficulty. Analysis of these different results highlight how the behaviour of the fluid-loaded shell influences the detection. PFinally, a test in a water-filled steel pipe is achieved for confirming experimentally the interest of the presented approach. -IntroductionThe fast and reliable detection of acoustic sources in complex industrial cylinder systems is of capital interest since such sources can be the consequence of defects or leaks in the installation. In the nuclear field, for example, a leak in a Steam Generator Unit (SGU) of a sodium fast nuclear reactor induces a water-sodium reaction. This reaction can damage the component. The purpose of this paper is to study the possibility of using a passive vibroacoustic method to detect and locate the noise generated by a water-sodium reaction of leak rate inferior to 1 g H2O /s. Different studies focussing on active and passive detection techniques have been published in the past [1][2][3]. The paper written by Kim et al. [4] focusses on characterising the acoustic noise spectra of different water-into-sodium leaks for a small flow rates (<1 g H2O /s). Chikazawa [5] developed a beamforming method to detect a leak at a frequency of 10 kHz assuming that it emits a planar acoustic field. This assumption, which is reasonable in the high frequency domain, necessitates a high number of sensors to cover the whole steam generator. Sing and Rao [6] looked at detecting a water injection into liquid sodium by measuring the acoustic field radiated by the installation with microphones located far from the system. Such a method is very simple but may be easily disturbed by external acoustic sources. Moreover, it may be useful for detecting leaks of flow rate strong enough to come out of the background noise. In the 1980's, Greene et. al developed a beamforming passive vibro-acoustic method called GAAD to detect and locate a sodium-water reaction in a SGU of a sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor [7][8][9]. In these papers, authors characterized with an experiment the performance of the localization and the detection time against the leak rate and the SGU power level. These papers show that ...

International audienceOne of the challenges in the performance prediction of the supercritical CO2 (sc-CO2) compressor is the real gas behavior of the working fluid near the critical point. This study deals with the establishment of an approach that allows coping with this particularity by dressing compressor performance maps in adequate reduced coordinates (i.e., suitable dimensionless speed and flow parameters inputs and pressure ratio and enthalpy rise outputs), while using CFD for its validation. Two centrifugal compressor designs have been considered in this work. The first one corresponds to a 6 kW small scale component implemented in a test loop at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The second one corresponds to a 38 MW scale 1:1 design considered at an early stage of a project that investigates sc-CO2 cycle for a Small Modular Reactor application. Numerical results on the former have been successfully confronted with the experimental data to qualify the ability of CFD to provide a performance database. Results on the latter have revealed a significant decrease in the static temperature and pressure during flow acceleration along the leading edge of the impeller blades. In this line, the increased risk of vapor pockets appearance inside a sc-CO2 compressor has been highlighted and recommendations regarding the choice of the on-design inlet conditions and the compressor design have been given to overcome this concern. CFD results on the scale 1:1 compressor have then been used to evaluate the relevancy of some previous performance maps approaches for a sc-CO2 compressor application. These include the conventional approach for ideal gas and its derivation, as well as a reference approach from the literature that was previously applied to model a sc-CO2 test compressor. As the dimensionless parameters of these approaches are found to yield discrepancies on the compressor performance, a revised approach that incorporates real gas formulations into turbomachinery key similarity parameters has been finally proposed. In support, an extensive number of CFD case studies has been carried out at various compressor inlet conditions, providing numerical results for its qualification. Accordingly, the proposed approach has been found to succeed in consistently representing and accurately predicting the sc-CO2 compressor performance over a wide operating range. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved