Investigation of LWR environmental effect on fatigue lifetime of austenitic stainless steel component

The fatigue lifetime of principal components in nuclear power plant is evaluated by using the design fatigue curves in ASME B and PV code during design process. However, it is inadequate to evaluate fatigue lifetime considering the LWR environmental effect by these design fatigue curves because these are presented only under atmosphere environment. Therefore, many studies are recently performed for the design fatigue curves considering LWR environmental effect and are presented that the design fatigue curves in ASME B and PV code can be non-conservative. In present paper, the limits and differences of the design fatigue curves considering environmental effect are presented. To investigate the change of fatigue lifetime according to each design fatigue curve, the CUFs for the pressurizer spray nozzle partly composed of austenitic stainless steel are calculated according to each one. Finally, if the evaluation result can not be satisfied with fatigue design requirement, the alternatives to reduce design cumulative usage factor are discussed. (author)