ISSN:
1662-9779
Source:
Scientific.Net: Materials Science & Technology / Trans Tech Publications Archiv 1984-2008
Topics:
Physics
Notes:
While the demand on electric power is consistently increasing, public concerns andregulations for the construction of new nuclear power plants are getting restrict, and also operatingnuclear power plants are gradually ageing. For this reason, the interest on lifetime extension foroperating nuclear power plants by applying lifetime management system is increasing. The 40-yeardesign life concept was originally introduced on the basis of economic and safety considerations. Inother words, it was not determined by technological evaluations. Also, the transient design datawhich were applied for fatigue damage evaluation were overly conservative in comparison withactual transient data. Therefore, the accumulation of fatigue damage may result in a big differencebetween the actual data and the design data. The lifetime of nuclear power plants is mostly dependenton the fatigue life of a reactor pressure vessel, and thus, the exact evaluation of fatigue life on areactor pressure vessel is a crucial factor in determining the extension of operating life. The purposeof this paper is to introduce a real-time fatigue monitoring system for an operating reactor pressurevessel which can be used for the lifetime extension. In order to satisfy the objectives, a web-basedtransient acquisition system was developed, thereby, real-time thermal-hydraulic data were reservedfor 18 operating reactor pressure vessels. A series of finite element analyses was carried out to obtainthe stress data due to actual transient. The fatigue life evaluation has been performed based on thestress analysis results and, finally, a web-based fatigue life evaluation system was introduced bycombining analysis results and on-line monitoring system. Comparison of the stress analysis resultsbetween operating transients and design transients showed a considerable amount of benefits in termsof fatigue life. Therefore, it is anticipated that the developed web-based system can be utilized as anefficient tool for fatigue life estimation of reactor pressure vessel
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://www.tib-hannover.de/fulltexts/2011/0528/02/23/transtech_doi~10.4028%252Fwww.scientific.net%252FSSP.120.25.pdf
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