Fatigue is one of the most important failure mechanisms to assess integrity and design life of nuclear power plants. Fatigue analysis procedure and the standard fatigue design curve (S-N curve) for the class 1 components are given in ASME code section III NB. However, the existing ASME fatigue design curve does not address the effects of light water reactor coolant environment. The life time of ALWRs is designed for 60 years, and recently the plant life time of currently operating NPPs has been extended 20 years more. If we assess the integrity and design life of major components by fatigue analysis considering environmental factor and S-N curve, the estimated fatigue usage factor will not meet the criterion. In this study, detailed fatigue analysis using three dimensional models were performed to develop the optimized fatigue analysis procedure and their results were compared with other references. The locations considered are the pressurizer surge line, the CVCS charging inlet nozzle and the steam generator economizer nozzle of the advanced power reactor 1400 (APR1400).

Volume Subject Area:
Component Reliability and Materials Issues
Topics:
Design, Fatigue analysis, Fatigue, Fatigue design, Nozzles, Nuclear power stations, ASME Standards, Boilers, Coolants, Failure mechanisms, Light water reactors, Surges, Three-dimensional models
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Copyright © 2008
 by ASME
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