Seismic Design Margin of the Piping and Support System: Part 3—Evaluation of Seismic Margin of the Piping System

Abstract

Seismic safety is one of the major key issues of nuclear power plant safety in Japan. It is demonstrated that nuclear piping possesses large safety margins through the piping and support system test, which consisted of three dimensional piping, supports, U-bolts, and concrete anchorages, using the E-defense vibration table of National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center, on extremely high seismic excitation level [1,2,3]. In the above test, the non-linear hysteretic behaviors of the support are quite complicated, but the dissipated energies introduce large damping effects on the piping system response. In order to evaluate the inelastic behavior of the support with respect to the whole piping system response, the following simulation methodology for the support re-evaluation is proposed. 1) Non-linear modeling of the support: • Failure mode and failure capacity of each support. • Simplified non-linear modeling of each support. 2) Simulation Analysis of the piping and support system: • Considering the non-linearity both of the supports and elbows in the piping system. 3) Evaluation of seismic margin: • Focused on the failure level for the support system, and the fatigue damage for the strain range of the piping. The limit state analysis of the typical piping system of a nuclear power plant is presented in this paper, and it is demonstrated that these evaluations of the seismic margins would give important insight into the support reinforcement program on the seismic re-evaluation work.