Analysis of Cured-in-Place Piping for a Nuclear Plant Application

Author(s):  
Alton Reich ◽  
Victor Newman ◽  
Roberto Di Salvo ◽  
John Charest

Cured-in-place piping (CIPP) is used to repair existing pressure pipe that has compromised structural integrity and is no longer capable of holding operating pressure without leaking. It is often used to repair buried piping where digging the piping up to replace it would be inconvenient and/or cost prohibitive. CIPP is routinely used to repair water and sewer lines, and an ASTM specification exists to guide the design of the pipe repair for these applications. CIPP can also be used as a repair technique for piping at nuclear power plants; however, such use must be approved on a case-by-case basis. This paper discusses some of the design challenges associated with designing the CIPP for a nuclear plant application. It presents an overview of the analytical approach and the results.

Author(s):  
Changyu Zhou ◽  
Bo Wang ◽  
Zhigang Sun ◽  
Jilin Xue ◽  
Xiaohua He

High temperature pressure pipes are widely used in power stations, nuclear power plants, and petroleum refinery, which always bear combined effects of high temperature, high pressure, and corrosive media, so the local pits are the most common volume defects in pressure pipe. Due to various reasons, the defects usually appear on the internal or external wall of pipe. In this paper, the dimensions of a defect were characterized as three dimensionless factors: relative depth, relative gradient and relative length. The main objects of study were the pipe with an internal pit and pipe with an external pit. Orthogonal array testing of three factors at four different levels was applied to analyze the sequence of the influence of three parameters. In present study, when the maximum principal strain nearby the location of the defects reaches 2%, the corresponding load is defined as the limit load, which is classified as two kinds of load type: limit pressure and limit bending moment. According to this strain criterion and isochronous stress strain data of P91 steel, the limit load of high temperature pipe with a local pit was determined by using ABAQUS. And in the same load condition of the pipe with the same dimensionless factors, the limit load of the internal defected pipe was compared with that of the external defected pipe. The results of this study can provide a reference for safety assessment and structural integrity analysis of high temperature creep pressure pipe with pit defects.


2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (11) ◽  
pp. 1988-1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
June-soo Park ◽  
Ha-cheol Song ◽  
Ki-seok Yoon ◽  
Taek-sang Choi ◽  
Jai-hak Park

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Rehmat Bashir ◽  
He Xue ◽  
Rui Guo ◽  
Yueqi Bi ◽  
Muhammad Usman

The structural integrity analysis of nuclear power plants (NPPs) is an essential procedure since the age of NPPs is increasing constantly while the number of new NPPs is still limited. Low-cyclic fatigue (LCF) and stress corrosion cracking (SSC) are the two main causes of failure in light-water reactors (LWRs). In the last few decades, many types of research studies have been conducted on these two phenomena separately, but the joint effect of these two mechanisms on the same crack has not been discussed yet though these two loads exist simultaneously in the LWRs. SCC is mainly a combination of the loading, the corrosive medium, and the susceptibility of materials while the LCF depends upon the elements such as compression, moisture, contact, and weld. As it is an attempt to combine SCC and LCF, this research focuses on the joint effect of SCC and LCF loading on crack propagation. The simulations are carried out using extended finite element method (XFEM) separately, for the SCC and LCF, on an identical crack. In the case of SCC, da/dt(mm/sec) is converted into da/dNScc (mm/cycle), and results are combined at the end. It has been observed that the separately calculated results for SCC da/dNScc and LCF da/dNm of crack growth rate are different from those of joint/overall effect,  da/dNom. By applying different SCC loads, the overall crack growth is measured as SCC load becomes the main cause of failure in LWRs in some cases particularly in the presence of residual stresses.


Author(s):  
R. S. Soni ◽  
R. K. Mishra ◽  
M. K. Agrawal ◽  
G. R. Reddy ◽  
H. S. Kushwaha ◽  
...  

In nuclear power plants, it is essential to design the various safety and safety related systems and components of the plant in such a manner that they maintain their structural integrity as well as serve their functional performance during a seismic event. The pre-operational seismic walk-through helps in ensuring the installation of various seismic supports as per design intent, identifying the areas where supports are inadequate, identifying the interaction concerns between the systems of various safety classes and locating the various undesired loose, untied / unanchored components, tools, etc. used during the construction activity. A detailed procedure for the pre-operational seismic walk-through of the NPPs was therefore, prepared. Since the types and locations of seismic supports for the various systems and components of the plant had been already reviewed, the major emphasis during the walk-through was laid on their proper installation.


Author(s):  
Amy J. Smith ◽  
Keshab K. Dwivedy

The management of flow assisted corrosion (FAC) has been a part of the maintenance of piping in nuclear power plants for more than 15 years. Programs have been set up to identify vulnerable locations, perform inspections, characterize the degraded configurations, and evaluate the structural integrity of the degraded sections. The section of the pipe is repaired or replaced if the structural integrity cannot be established for the projected degraded section at the next outage. During the past 15 years, significant improvements have been made to every aspect of the program including structural integrity evaluation. Simplified methods and rules are established in ASME Section XI code and in several code cases for verifying structural integrity. The evaluation of structural integrity is performed during the plant outage prior to a decision for repair or replacement. Any improvement in structural integrity evaluation to extend the life of a component by one additional operating cycle can help in performance of repair/replacement of component in a planned manner. Simplified methods and rules provided in the code can be easily used for analysis of pipe sections with degraded area with uniform wall thickness and for non-uniformly degraded sections, provided the degraded portions are modeled with uniform wall thickness equal to the lowest thickness of the section. The representation of a non-uniformly degraded section in this manner is necessarily conservative. The purpose of this paper is to develop methodology to analyze the non-uniformly degraded sections subjected to pressure and moment loading by modeling it in a manner that accounts for the non-uniform cross-section. The formulation developed here is more realistic than the code methodology and is still conservative. The results are presented in form of charts comparing the limit moment capacity of the degraded sections calculated by the formulation in this paper with that using ASME code formulation. The paper concludes that the proposed formulation can be used to supplement the ASME Code method to extend the remaining life of FAC degraded components.


Author(s):  
John Sharples ◽  
Elisabeth Keim

NUGENIA, an international non-profit association founded under Belgian legislation and launched in March 2012, is dedicated to nuclear research and development (R&D) with a focus on Generation II and III power plants. NUGENIA is the integrated framework between industry, research and safety organisations for safe, reliable and competitive nuclear power production, and is aimed at running an open innovation marketplace, to promote the emergence of joint research and to facilitate the implementation and dissemination of R&D results. The technical scope of NUGENIA consists of eight technical areas. One of these areas, Technical Area 4, is associated with the structural integrity assessment of systems, structures and components. A brief overview of recent NUGENIA activities in general is provided in this paper and a specific focus is given on developments in relation to Technical Area 4.


Author(s):  
Asko Vuorinen

The Finnish companies have built four medium size nuclear power plants. In addition they have constructed two nuclear icebreakers and several floating power plants. The latest 1650 MWe nuclear power plant under construction Olkiluoto-3 has had many problems, which have raised the costs of the plant to €3500/kWe from its original estimate of €2000/kWe and constriction schedule from four to eight years. It is possible to keep the costs down and schedule short by making the plant in shipyard and transport it to site by sea. The plant could be then lifted to its place by pumping seawater into the channel. This kind of concept was developed by the author in 1991, when he was making his thesis of modular gas fired power plants in Helsinki University of Technology. The modular construction of nuclear plants has made in a form of two nuclear icebreakers, which Wa¨rtsila¨ Marine has built in Helsinki Shipyard. The latest modular nuclear plant was launched in 2010 in St Petersburg shipyard. One of the benefits of modular construction is a possibility to locate the plant under rock by making the transportation channels in tunnels. This will give the plant external protection for aircraft crash and make the outer containment unnecessary. The water channels could also be used as pressure suppression pools in case of venting steam from the containment. This could reduce the radioactive releases in case of possible reactor accidents. The two 440 MW VVER plants build in Finland had construction costs of €1600 /kWe at 2011 money. The author believes that a 1200 MW nuclear plant with four 300 MW units can be constructed in five years and with €3300/kW costs, where the first plant could be generating power within 40 months and next units with 6 month intervals.


Author(s):  
William Server ◽  
Timothy Hardin ◽  
Milan Brumovsky´

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has had a series of reactor pressure vessel (RPV) structural integrity programs that started back in the 1970s. These Coordinated Research Projects most recently have focused on use of the Master Curve fracture toughness testing approach for RPV and other ferritic steel components and on the issue of pressurized thermal shock (PTS) in operating pressurized water reactors. This paper will provide the current status for these projects and discuss the implications for improved safety of key ferritic steel components in nuclear power plants (NPPs).


2016 ◽  
Vol 853 ◽  
pp. 453-457
Author(s):  
Ming Ya Chen ◽  
Wei Wei Yu ◽  
Jin Hua Shi ◽  
Rong Shan Wang ◽  
Lv Feng ◽  
...  

Most of the French Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) are currently embarking upon efforts to renew their operating license, while the pressurized thermal shock (PTS) events and environmentally assisted fatigue (EAF) pose potentially significant challenges to the structural integrity of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) which has the potential to be NPP life-limiting conditions. In the assessment of the PTS events, the deterministic fracture mechanics (DFM) is still used as the basic mechanics in most countries except for the USA. While the maximum nil-ductility-transition temperature (RTNDT) is about 80°C for 54 French RPVs after 40 years operation, the maximum allowable RTNDT is only about 70 oC and 80 oC for the typical PTS events in the IAEA and NEA reports, respectively. On the other hand, the effects of light water reactor (LWR) environmental (other than moderate environment in the code) were not considered in the original design, while the effects of LWR environmental are needed to be considered in the LRA according to the USA regulations. In this paper, the challenges of the PTS and EAF are discussed, and some suggestions are also given for the LRA


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Wang ◽  
G. Z. Wang ◽  
F. Z. Xuan ◽  
S. T. Tu

In this paper, the J-R curves of two cracks (A508 HAZ crack 2 and A508/Alloy52Mb interface crack 3) located at the weakest region in an Alloy52M dissimilar metal welded joint (DMWJ) for connecting pipe-nozzle of nuclear pressure vessel have been measured by using single edge-notched bend (SENB) specimens with different crack depths a/W (different constraint). Based on the modified T-stress constraint parameter τ*, the equations of constraint-dependent J-R curves for the crack 2 and crack 3 were obtained. The predicted J-R curves using different constraint equations derived from the three pairs of crack growth amount all agree with the experimental J-R curves. The results show that the modified T-stress approach for obtaining constraint-dependent J-R curves of homogeneous materials can also be used for the DMWJs with highly heterogeneous mechanical properties (local strength mismatches) in nuclear power plants. The use of the constraint-dependent J-R curves may increase the accuracy of structural integrity design and assessment for the DMWJs of nuclear pressure vessels.


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