Abstract
Research shows how the impact of inaccurate fatigue calculations (SIFs), poor quality materials and manufacturing shortcuts will eventually result in pipe content leaks that will cause significant business interruption costs and potentially casualties in a very small population of operating piping systems. B31J-2017 corrects many of these inaccurate SIFs but has been slow to be implemented by the piping user community because failures due to thermal overstresses occur much closer to the end of the piping system life than the beginning. Fortunately for the owner this leaves time to correct for any errors once they have been recognized. Relatively simple screening is described that allows the owner and designer to identify the relatively small population of piping systems that should be addressed.
