A primary challenge for the current fleet of light water reactors in the United States is age-related degradation of their passive assets that include concrete, cables, piping, and the reactor pressure vessel. Various nondestructive techniques exist for locally assessing degradation in passive structures in nuclear power plants. This paper presents results from the analysis of acoustic data acquired using the vibro-acoustic modulation (VAM) technique on a medium-sized concrete slab (2 × 2 × 0.5 ft), which has undergone degradation due to alkali-silica reaction (ASR). VAM is a nonlinear vibration technique in which the structure of interest is excited using a combination of specific frequencies and the response is recorded. VAM assumes that an undamaged structure can be represented by a linear system while the representation of a damaged structure must include nonlinearity. Two piezo-stack actuators are used to excite the slab. One stack is dedicated to excite the slab at a low frequency, referred to as pump frequency, and another stack is dedicated to excite the slab at a high frequency, referred to as probe frequency. The concrete slab was cured in an environmental chamber to accelerate ASR-related degradation. In this paper, the measured acoustic signals are analyzed in both the time and frequency domains to understand state of health of the concrete specimen.

Nuclear industry spends enormous time and resources on designing and managing piping nozzles in a plant. Nozzle locations are considered as a potential location for possible failure that can lead to loss of coolant accident. Industry spends enormous time in condition monitoring and margin management at nozzle locations. Margins against seismic loads play a significant role in the overall margin management. Available margins against thermal loads are highly dependent upon seismic margins. In recent years, significant international collaboration has been undertaken to study the seismic margin in piping systems and nozzles through experimental and analytical studies. It has been observed that piping nozzles are highly overdesigned and the margins against seismic loads are quite high. While this brings a perspective of sufficient safety, such excessively high margins compete with available margins against thermal loads particularly during the life extension and subsequent license renewal studies being conducted by many plants around the world. This paper focuses on identifying and illustrating two key reasons that lead to excessively conservative estimates of nozzle fragilities. First, it compares fragilities based on conventional seismic analysis that ignores piping-equipment-structure interaction on nozzle fragility with the corresponding assessment by considering such interactions. Then, it presents a case that the uncertainties considered in various parameters for calculating nozzle fragility are excessively high. The paper identifies a need to study the various uncertainties in order to achieve a more realistic quantification based on recent developments in our understanding of the seismic behavior of piping systems.

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Fragility assessment requires characterization of a component or system's performance through a performance function/limit-state equation. The exceedance of limit-state is representative of failure or damage state. For the purposes of evaluating piping fragility, characterizing the behavior of T-joints through an appropriate performance function is critical, as failures in piping are generally localized at the location of T-joints, elbows, and nozzles. Past studies have utilized a monotonic rotation-based performance function. However, the existing criteria does not account for the effect of cyclic behavior. As observed during prior experimental studies, the T-joint behavior under cyclic loading is different from that under monotonic loading, and therefore, it is important to include the effects of cyclic behavior while characterizing a performance function. Moreover, the monotonic rotation-based performance function could not replicate all the leakage locations observed during experimental studies on a full-scale two-story piping system. Therefore, it is important to develop a new limit-state for accurate piping fragility assessment. This paper presents the development of a new limit state which considers the cyclic behavior of a T-joint and quantifies the number of cycles to failure.

Internal flooding due to pipe breaks can interfere with a plant's ability to safely shut down or maintain the decay heat removal. Flooding simulation tools require information on location of pipe breaks and the degree of damage at each location as input for assessing the flooding risk. This can be especially challenging as the number of potential leakage locations are quite large and the state-of-the-art simulation tools cannot determine the degree of damage at a location. This paper presents a novel simulation-based framework that can be used to determine seismically induced flooding scenarios including the potential locations of leakage and the degree of leakage at each location. The proposed framework builds upon a few recent experimental and simulation-based studies on piping fragilities. This research identifies that a direct use of piping fragility information by flooding simulation tools is not appropriate. This paper presents a new approach that creates mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive events to characterize the complete sample space at each location and employs the total probability theorem to characterize the probabilities for each event in this space. This paper also identifies the importance of including the temporal effects in the piping fragilities in order to allow a more realistic simulation of internal flooding scenarios.