Nuclear power plant operators face major challenges in managing the lifetime of civil engineering structures. Replacement is not feasible, so long-term operation must be justified to safety authorities.
Structural Health Monitoring, supported by measurement, experiments, and modeling, is essential to understand degradation mechanisms. Non-destructive testing helps validate predictions, but evaluating new techniques remains difficult. Key CE structures include containment buildings, biological shields, cooling towers, and concrete pipes.
The project aims to assess aging effects on leak tightness and corrosion, optimize repair strategies, and ensure safety function performance over time.
What is CISTERN?
To achieve its objectives, the project is structured around three core pillars: measurement, materials, and structure. Accordingly, it is organized into the following objectives:
- Structure Assessment: This objective brings together actions aimed at defining methodologies for structural assessment, integrating material analysis, non-destructive testing, and modeling where appropriate.
- Concrete Ageing: This objective focuses on characterizing and modeling concrete ageing phenomena, developing repair and mitigation strategies, and assessing their impact on structural behavior.
- Inspection: This objective consolidates efforts to define and industrialize methodologies for diagnosing and interpreting degradation in concrete structures, based on NDT techniques and measurement data.
The results of the project will contribute to:
- Developing a maintenance doctrine for nuclear civil engineering structures.
- Supporting the estimation of service life and the safety justification of these structures to regulatory authorities.
