Numerical simulation of temperature and thermal stress for nuclear piping by using computational fluid dynamics analysis and Green’s function

Abstract

Owing to the fact that thermal fatigue is a well-known damage mechanism in nuclear power plants, accurate stress and fatigue evaluation are highly important. Operating experience shows that the design condition is conservative compared to the actual one. Therefore, various fatigue monitoring methods have been extensively utilized to consider the actual operating data. However, defining the local temperature in the piping is difficult because temperature-measuring instruments are limited. The purpose of this paper is to define accurate local temperature in the piping and evaluate thermal stress using Green’s function (GF) by performing a series of computational fluid dynamics analyses considering the complex fluid conditions. Also, the thermal stress is determined by adopting GF and comparing it with that of the design condition. The fluid dynamics analysis result indicates that the fluid temperature slowly varies compared to the designed one even when the flow rate changes abruptly. In addition, the resulting thermal stress can significantly decrease when reflecting the actual temperature.