Reliability-based inspection and maintenance planning of a nuclear feeder piping system

Elizabeth Bismut, Mahesh D. Pandey and Daniel Straub

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2022, vol. 224, issue C

Abstract: Inspection and maintenance (I&M) is essential to ensure the integrity of feeder pipes, which are parts of the primary heat transport system in a nuclear power plant. The pipes are subject to flow accelerated corrosion (FAC), which can compromise the integrity of the piping system and lead to high repair costs. We explore the opportunity for improving I&M strategies while ensuring that the system still maintains an acceptable level of reliability. To this aim, a reliability-based planning framework is proposed, in which every pipe in the system meets the minimum thickness requirement at a specified annual probability. With this planning framework we can a) evaluate the performance of any I&M strategy constrained to a fixed reliability criterion, without requiring this strategy to be specifically designed for such a criterion; and b) find an I&M strategy optimized for this reliability level using a heuristic description of the strategy space. We demonstrate the framework with a case study, where the wall thinning due to FAC is modeled as a Gamma process with uncertain parameters. We compare the expected life-cycle cost of multiple strategies for I&M of a feeder system with 480 pipes. The proposed approach is compared with an I&M strategy currently used by the industry, which highlights the efficiency of the proposed optimization method.

Keywords: Maintenance; Flow accelerated corrosion; Reliability-based planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832022001764
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:224:y:2022:i:c:s0951832022001764

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2022.108521

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().