• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.9
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• pp.1293-1298
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• 2010

In most power plants, wall thinning in carbon-steel pipes due to flow-accelerated corrosion is one of the major aging phenomena, and it reduces the load-carrying capacity of the piping system. Various types of wall-thinning defects were manufactured in real-scale elbows, and monotonic in-plane bending tests were performed under internal pressure to evaluate the failure behavior of the elbows. In this paper, the behavior of elastic and plastic limit leads of locally thinned elbows in a real-scale failure test is presented. The loads determined on the basis of TES (twice elastic slope) were considered to be the limit loads of locally thinned elbows so that the integrity of the thinned elbows could be maintained, even when a small amount of plastic deformation might have occurred.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.33 no.8
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• pp.826-831
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• 2009

The piping systems in nuclear power plant are composed of various typed pipes such as straight, elbow pipe, branch and reducer etc. The elbow is connected from straight pipe to another pipes in order to establish the complicated piping system. Elbow is one of very important components considering management of wall thinning degradation. It is however applied by various loads such as system pressure, earthquake, postulated break loading and many transient loads, which provoke simply the internal pressure, bending and torsional stress. In this study, firstly pipes in the secondary system of the nuclear power plant are classified as pipe size and type for selecting the investigating range. Next, a large number of finite element analysis considering the all typed dimensions of commercial pipe has been performed to find out the behavior of TES(twice elastic slop) plastic load of elbows, which is based on evaluation of the structural safety factor. Finally performance based structural safety factor was investigated comparing with maximum allowable load by construction code.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.281-286
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• 2008

Wall thinning defect due to flow accelerated corrosion is one of major aging phenomena in most power plant industries, and it results in reducing load carrying capacity of the piping systems. A failure testing system was set up for real scale elbows containing various simulated wall thinning defects, and monotonic in-plane bending tests were performed under internal pressure to find out the failure behavior of thinned elbows. Various finite element models were generated and analysed to figure out and simulate the behavior for other thinning shapes and loading conditions. This paper presents the decreasing trends of load carrying capacity according to the thinning dimensions which were revealed from the investigation of finite element analysis results. A mechanical integrity evaluation model for thinned elbows was proposed, also. This model can be used to calculate the TES plastic load of thinned elbows for general internal pressure, thinning location, and in-plane bending direction.