Abstract
Structural integrity assessment of thin-walled pipes and pipe items has become one of the major issues in the nuclear power plant. ASME Section XI Code Case N-597-2 provides a criterion for acceptance of the pipes. But the code case has several limitations for application and sometimes gives too conservative or non-conservative results. So it is necessary to understand fully the technical bases of the code case. In the code case N-597, the allowable local thicknesses of thinned straight pipes are given for three different cases. Because of the different technical base, each case gives different thickness values and sometimes gives contradictory values. In this paper attempts were made in order to propose a unified rule for the allowable local thickness and in order to remove or relax the restrictions on the application of the code case. For this purpose elastic stress analyses were made using the finite element method and the stress results were examined. Based on the obtained bending stress results, a very simple procedure was proposed to obtain the consistent allowable local thickness for the thinned straight pipes.
