Refined analysis of piping systems according to nuclear standard regulations

The problem of analyzing a piping line to nuclear standard regulations has been widely discussed in the open literature. The following problems are discussed: a) to analyze the piping under various loading conditions both static (dead weight, thermal movements etc.) and dynamic (seismic, steam hammer etc.); b) to analyze the piping from the regulatory point of view to show its acceptability and conformance to the applicable rules (generally ASME 3); c) to handle a very large amount of data and to transfer them from one program to another; d) to compute some data necessary for the analysis from the ones available in the specifications (e.g. to convert data on thermal transitories into transitories on the pipe wall or to compute floor response spectra from data on seismic analysis of applicable buildings floors); e) to check for possible errors mainly in the description of the geometry. These problems belong to different fields (structural, seismic, thermal, computer programming) and their solution requires a combination of efforts of people with different experience. (Auth.)