Study on fatigue of reactor coolant piping and minimum piping wall thickness

As a core issue in fatigue qualification for nuclear power plant reactor coolant piping, FEM thermal transient analysis are used to pursue the wall thickness thermal field, instead of finite difference equation, which could be brought to the Code equation for fatigue analysis by solving the transient alternating stress amplitude. Calculation methodology, Optimization algorithm for minimum wall thickness, and flow chart of iterative solution are addressed in this paper, those items can be achieved programmatically. (authors)