Investigation of the Performance Based Structural Safety Factor of Elbows in Nuclear Power Plants

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.