• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.22 no.1 s.79
• /
• pp.13-18
• /
• 2007

Structural integrity assessment of thin-walled pipes and pipe items has become one of the major issues in the nuclear power plant. ASME Section XI Code Case N-597-2 provides a criterion for acceptance of the pipes. But the code case has several limitations for application and sometimes gives too conservative or non-conservative results. So it is necessary to understand fully the technical bases of the code case. In the code case N-597, the allowable local thicknesses of thinned straight pipes are given for three different cases. Because of the different technical base, each case gives different thickness values and sometimes gives contradictory values. In this paper attempts were made in order to propose a unified rule for the allowable local thickness and in order to remove or relax the restrictions on the application of the code case. For this purpose elastic stress analyses were made using the finite element method and the stress results were examined. Based on the obtained bending stress results, a very simple procedure was proposed to obtain the consistent allowable local thickness for the thinned straight pipes.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
• /
• 2005.11a
• /
• pp.114.2-114.2
• /
• 2005

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.81-88
• /
• 2001

This study proposed an analytical method to evaluate a local allowable wall thickness (LAWT) for locally thinned pipe subjected to internal pressure and bending moment. In this method, the stresses in the thinned region were calculated by finite element analysis and plastic collapse was applied as a failure criterion of thinned pipe. Using this method, LAWT for a simplified thinned pipe was evaluated with variation in axial extent of thinned area, and it was compared with allowable wall thickness provided by previous pipe wall thickness criteria. The results showed that the LAWT was lower, about 50%, than that calculated by construction code or ASME Code N-597, and it was higher, about 2 times, than that estimated by evaluation model based on pipe experiments. In addition, LAWT was decreased with increasing axial extent of thinned area and saturated with further increase in axial extent. And, the variation in LAWT with axial extent of thinned area depended on type of load, especially a magnitude of bending moment, considering in the evaluation.