Abstract
Safety-related items in nuclear power plants are now generally placed separately from the non-safety-related items, but it was not strictly required before. Therefore, it is very important to study whether the non-safety-related items will affect the safety-related items when they are dropped down in an earthquake situation, which determines the safety of a nuclear power plant and its future life extension applications.
This research was based on the cooling water system room with the safety and non-safety related items installed together, as an example to study whether the non-safety-related items such as vent pipes and DN50 fire fighting pipes arranged above will damage the DN300 pipes and valves arranged below when earthquakes occur.
For the experiments, the relative positions of objects in the room was reproduced by 1: 1. The pressure-holding performance of the pipe was used as a criterion for the damage. The research results of the experiments show that when the 10-meter-long DN50 pipe was dropped from the position of 8 meters height and the 8-meter-long vent dropped from position of 3.6 meters height, they do not affect the integrity of the DN300 valve and pipe below. After the experiment, pressure drop in two hours for the pipe is less than 0.1%. The main body of the valve does not fail neither.
The numerical simulation study also shows that there is no failure phenomenon in the simulation as well. Compared with the test results, the impact acceleration and the vent deformation both have the same trend.
