Thin-walled vacuum containment vessels cooled by circulating water jackets are often utilized in research and industrial applications where isolation of equipment or experiments from the influences of the surrounding environment is desirable. The development of leaks in these vessels can result in costly downtime for the facility. A Vessel Integrity Monitoring System (VIMS) is developed to detect leak formation and estimate the size of the leak to allow evaluation of the risk associated with continued operation.

A wide range of leak configurations and fluid flow phenomena are considered in the evaluation of the rate at which a tracer gas dissolved in the cooling jacket water is transported into the vacuum vessel. A methodology is presented that uses basic fluid flow models and careful evaluation of their ranges of applicability to provide a conservative estimate of the transport rates for the tracer gas and hence the time required for the VIMS to detect a leak of a given size.