Development of Nuclear Piping Integriry Expert System (II) -System Development and Case Studies-

The objective of this paper is to develop an expert system called NPIES for nuclear piping integrity. This paper describes the structure and the development strategy of the NPIES system. The NPIES system consists of 3 part; the data input part, the analysis part and the output part. The data input part consists of the material properties database module and the suer interface module. The analysis part consists of the LEFM, CDFD, J/T, limit load modules and the 12 analysis routines for different cracks and loading conditions are provided respectively. Analysis results are presented to screen, printer and text file in the output part. Several case studies on circumferentially cracked piping were performed to evaluate the accuracy and the usefulness of the code. Maximum piping loads predicted by the NPIES system agreed well with those by the 3-dimensional finite element analysis. In addition, even if the material properties were not fully given, the NPIES system provided reasonable evaluation results with the predicted material properties inferred from the material properties database module.