Development of hardware-in-the-loop simulator for piping integrity evaluation

In order to verify the analytical methods predicting failure behavior of cracked pipes, full-scale pipe tests are crucial in nuclear power plant piping. For this reason, series of international test programs have been conducted. However, full-scale pipe tests require expensive testing equipment and long period of testing time. The objective of this paper is to develop a test system that can economically simulate the full-scale pipe test regarding the integrity evaluation. This system provides the failure behavior of cracked pipe by testing a wide-plate specimen. The system was developed for the integrity evaluation of nuclear piping based on the methodology of hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation. Using this simulator, piping integrity evaluation can be performed based on elastic-plastic behavior of full-scale pipe, and the high cost full-scale pipe test may be replaced with this economical system