Evaluation Method for Seismic Fatigue Damage of Plant Pipeline

Abstract

Although acceleration and cumulative absolute velocity (CAV) are used as seismic indexes, their relationship with the damage mechanism is not yet understood. In this paper, a simplified evaluation method for seismic fatigue damage, which can be used as a seismic index for screening, is derived from the stress amplitude obtained from CAV for one cycle in accordance with the velocity criterion in ASME Operation and Maintenance of Nuclear Power Plants 2012, and the linear cumulative damage due to fatigue can be obtained from the linear cumulative damage rule. To verify the performance of the method, the vibration response of a cantilever pipe is calculated for four earthquake waves, and the cumulative fatigue damage is evaluated using the rain flow method. The result is in good agreement with the value obtained by the method based on the relative response. When the response spectrum obtained by the evaluation method is considered, the value obtained by the evaluation method has a peak at the peak frequency of the ground motion, and the value decreases with increasing natural frequency above the peak frequency. A higher peak frequency of the base leads to a higher value obtained by the evaluation method.