Development of a software for the ASME code qualification of class-I nuclear piping systems

In nuclear industry, the designer often comes across the requirements of Class-1 piping systems which need to be qualified for various normal and abnormal loading conditions. In order to have quick design changes and the design reviews at various stages of design, it is quite helpful if a dedicated software is available for the qualification of Class-1 piping systems. BARC has already purchased a piping analysis software CAESAR-II and has used it for the life extension of heavy water plant, Kota. CAESAR-II facilitates the qualification of Class-2 and Class-3 piping systems among others. However, the present version of CAESAR-II does not have the capability to perform stress checks for the ASME Class-1 nuclear piping systems. With this requirement in mind and the prohibitive costs of commercially available software for the Class-1 piping analyses, it was decided to develop a separate software for this class of piping in such a way that the input and output details of the piping from the CAESAR-II software can be made use of. This report principally contains the details regarding development of a software for codal qualification of Class-1 nuclear piping as per ASME code section-III, NB-3600. The entire work was carried out in three phases. The first phase consisted of development of the routines for reading the output files obtained from the CAESAR-II software, and converting them into required format for further processing. In this phase, the nodewise informations available from the CAESAR-II output file were converted into element-wise informations. The second phase was to develop a general subroutine for reading the various input parameters such as diameter, wall thickness, corrosion allowance, bend radius and also to recognize the bend elements based on the bend radius, directly from the input file of CAESAR-II software. The third phase was regarding the incorporation of the required steps for performing the ASME codal checks as per NB-3600 for Class-1 piping systems. The developed software has been tested analytically for verification of the results and has been found to be performing satisfactorily. (author)