Monitoring the thermal discharge of hongyanhe nuclear power plant with aerial remote sensing technology using a UAV platform

Existing monitoring approaches are not effective in deal with routine thermal discharge monitoring requirements of nuclear power plants. This paper describes a monitoring methodology using an aerial remote sensing monitoring system based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform by taking the monitoring of the thermal discharge of the Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant as an example, and conducts a study on remote sensing extraction of thermal diffusion information of the thermal discharge. In this study, quartic polynomial fitting and parallel real data correction are used to correct the wide-angle distortion and acquire the water body surface temperature information, respectively. Synchronized measured data validation of independent samples indicates that the system can acquire diffusion information of the thermal discharge accurately, and the retrieval error of the surface water temperature is within 0.4°C. Results analysis shows that this efficient and convenient aerial remote sensing monitoring system based on a UAV platform can effectively make up inadequacies of existing monitoring technical measures and offers high precision. This system is expected to be further adopted and applied for post-assessment of the environmental impact of nuclear power plant thermal discharge and service monitoring.