Research on Fatigue Monitoring System Development for Nuclear Power Plant

Fatigue is the major aging mechanism for pipelines and components that are subject to transient during plant operation. In order to avoid abrupt accidents caused by fatigue failure, it is necessary to adopt corresponding techniques to monitor components condition due to fatigue damage. Experience shows that on-line fatigue monitoring system is the most effective way to monitor fatigue damage status of pressure-retaining boundary subjected to operational loads in real-time for NPPs. Several commercial fatigue monitoring systems have been put into application in the nuclear power plants. In this paper, the difference of the international fatigue monitoring systems were compared. As the key technologies of fatigue monitoring system development, the processing of operational load data and the stress influencing function development at monitored locations were researched in the paper. Furthermore, in order to study on the methodologies of the key issues of the system development, the experimental facility was established to improve the knowledge on fatigue monitoring system development for two kinds of input data modules, and the reasonability of the different methods in the study was proved reciprocally. Finally, the on-line fatigue monitoring system for pipelines was established to evaluate actual fatigue damage status.