Several nuclear power plants in Japan have been operating for more than 30 years and cracks due to age-related degradations have been detected in some piping systems during in-service inspections. Furthermore, several of them have experienced severe earthquakes in recent years. Therefore, failure probability analysis and fragility evaluation for piping systems, taking both age-related degradations and seismic loads into consideration, has become increasingly important for the structural integrity evaluation and the seismic probabilistic risk assessment.
Probabilistic fracture mechanics (PFM) is recognized as a rational methodology for failure probability analysis and fragility evaluation of aged piping, because it can take the scatters and uncertainties of influence parameters into account. In our Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), a PFM analysis code PASCAL-SP was developed for aged piping considering age-related degradations. In this study, we improved PASCAL-SP for the fragility evaluation taking both age-related degradations and seismic loads into account. The details of the improvement of PASCAL-SP are explained and some example analysis results of failure probabilities, fragility curves and a preliminary investigation on seismic safety margin are presented in this paper.
