Distributed temperature monitoring for liquid sodium leakage detection using OFDR-based Rayleigh backscattering

For the first time, a gold coated single mode optical fiber has been used to detect a liquid sodium leakage on a pipe of secondary circuit pipe mock-up of nuclear fast reactor (Gen IV) by means of Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry-based on Rayleigh backscattering. During 150 min of the experiment we were able to detect and monitor the evolution of a liquid sodium leakage on the surface of the pipe.