Supplementation of Flow Accelerated Corrosion Prediction Program Using Numerical Analysis Technique

Flow-accelerated corrosion (FAC) leads to thinning of steel pipe walls that are exposed to flowing water or wet steam. From experience, it is seen that FAC damage to piping at fossil and nuclear plants can result in outages that require expensive repairs and can affect plant reliability and safety. CHECWORKS have been utilized in domestic nuclear plants as a predictive tool to assist FAC engineers in planning inspections and evaluating the inspection data so that piping failures caused by FAC can be prevented. However, CHECWORKS may be occasionally ignore local susceptible portions when predicting FAC damage in a group of pipelines after constructing a database for all the secondary side piping in nuclear plants. This paper describes the methodologies that can complement CHECWORKS and the verifications of CHECWORKS prediction results using numerical analysis. FAC susceptible locations determined using CHECWORKS for two pipeline groups of a nuclear plant was compared with determined using the numerical-analysis-based FLUENT