Analysis of the Application of Laser Welding Technology on Maintenance of the Underwater Components of Nuclear Power Station

Abstract

This paper put its eyes on the PWR's underwater components which have the risk of early failure after long-term inservice because the material tends to deteriorate and embrittle due to irradiation and other factors, and should be maintenanced. In this paper, we contrastively analyse two main technologies used as underwater welding, named underwater wet laser welding and underwater local dry laser welding. It is difficult to obtain high quality weld seam by underwater wet laser welding for the reason of some disadvantages on laser beam underwater, such as water attenuation, bubble reflection and so on. On constract, underwater local dry laser-welding can obtain high quality weld-joints, and becomes the current hotshot. But, there are still some problems to be settled, such as the way to obtain stable underwater chamber and the protection of back of full penetration weld. Analysis of the retrieva of underwater laser welding on Web Science, we can find that underwater laser welding technology has step out laboratory to engineering application and the in-depth theoretical research is also actively carried out on the fields of picosecond, femtosecond laser.