Seismic analysis of liquid metal reactor piping systems

To safely assess the adequacy of the LMR piping, a three-dimensional piping code, SHAPS, has been developed at Argonne National Laboratory. This code was initially intended for calculating hydrodynamic-wave propagation in a complex piping network. It has salient features for treating fluid transients of fluid-structure interactions for piping with in-line components. The code also provides excellent structural capabilities of computing stresses arising from internal pressurization and 3-D flexural motion of the piping system. As part of the development effort, the SHAPS code has been further augmented recently by introducing the capabilities of calculating piping response subjected to seismic excitations. This paper describes the finite-element numerical algorithm and its applications to LMR piping under seismic excitations. A time-history analysis technique using the implicit temporal integration scheme is addressed. A 3-D pipe element is formulated which has eight degrees of freedom per node (three displacements, three rotations, one membrane displacement, and one bending rotation) to account for the hoop, flexural, rotational, and torsional modes of the piping system. Both geometric and material nonlinearities are considered. This algorithm is unconditionally stable and is particularly suited for the seismic analysis