This past Holiday Season, the Charlotte office of Structural Integrity collected donations for Angels and Sparrows Soup Kitchen, whose mission is to fight hunger in Huntersville and the surrounding area.
https://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2014-12-20-12.01.31-scaled.jpg14402560Structural Integrityhttps://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/logo-name-4-930x191-1.pngStructural Integrity2020-12-28 18:08:152021-06-22 20:10:49Structural Integrity Associates Food and Donations Collection for Angels & Sparrows
” I am proud of the SI Fuel Team”, said Mark Marano, SI CEO.” This milestone exemplifies our ability to provide innovative structural integrity solutions for clients across structures, systems, components, water chemistry and nuclear fuel.”
Structural Integrity is an employee-owned specialty engineering and services company providing innovative engineering solutions and services to achieve asset management excellence across multiple industries including Nuclear, Fossil, Oil & Gas, Renewables, and Critical Infrastructure.
https://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Pegasus-Whats-New-Revised-2-668x363-1.jpg363668Structural Integrityhttps://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/logo-name-4-930x191-1.pngStructural Integrity2020-12-04 11:00:072021-07-12 17:42:30Structural Integrity Associates Achieves Milestone with Pegasus Code Development
Mike comes to SI following tenures at Westinghouse Electric and Framatome. During his 25 year career in the nuclear industry, Mike has held a variety of leadership roles that spanned operations and business development. Selected accomplishments in the operations realm during that time included building and leading the Westinghouse Balance of Plant Engineering Department that included over 100 engineers, and leading the commercial deployment of a new alloy 600 mitigation technology in the US. From a commercial standpoint, Mike led the Business Development Departments for two different 75+ Million dollar businesses to achieve substantial top-line growth.
Mike will bring the broad range of experiences to SI to drive improvement in project management in order to achieve next-level performance and customer satisfaction. Mike will also hold a secondary role of Business Development in the SI Nuclear Business Unit, where he will use his experience and industry contacts to promote SI engineering technology to the global fleet.
https://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Executive-Director-of-Project-Management-Nuclear-Business-Development-Leader.jpg363668Structural Integrityhttps://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/logo-name-4-930x191-1.pngStructural Integrity2020-10-26 14:07:422021-06-22 20:10:49Executive Director of Project Management Nuclear Business Development Leader
A U.S. BWR utility contracted with Structural Integrity (SI) to review their current reinspection guidance documents relative to those contained in the BWRVIP inspection guidelines, the purpose of which was two-fold:
Are current reinspection guidelines compliant with industry requirements?
Are there components where reinspection intervals could possibly be extended?
Acoustic resonance is a phenomenon in which an acoustic system amplifies sound waves whose frequency matches one of its own natural frequencies of vibration (its resonance frequencies).
in everyday life.In the most simple at home example, blowing air over the open end of a bottle.Blow too hard, nothing. Blow too soft, nothing.When done just right, the bottle produces a sound (audible vibration).Just like that, you have acoustic resonance.Every wind instrument in a band uses acoustic cavity resonance to produce music.Take a piece of flexible hose, spin it in the air until it whistles, again, acoustic resonance.When an acoustic cavity resonance happens inside piping systems, especially those with high energy flow, those seemingly harmless vibrations we illustrated above can cause serious damage.This phenomena can occur in nearly any industry, sometimes with benign consequences and other times with catastrophic results.
From the US Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, “The demanding environments of an operating nuclear reactor may impact the ability of a broad range of materials to perform their intended function over extended service periods. Routine surveillance and repair/replacement activities can mitigate the impact of this degradation; however, failures still occur. With reactors being licensed to operate for periods up to 60 years, with further extensions under consideration, and power uprates being planned, many of the plant systems, structures, and components will be expected to tolerate more demanding environments for longer periods. The longer plant operating lifetimes may increase the susceptibility of different systems, structures, and components to degradation and may introduce new degradation modes.
While all components potentially can be replaced, decisions to simply replace components may not be practical or the most economically favorable option.Therefore, understanding, controlling, and mitigating materials degradation processes and establishing a sound technical basis for long-range planning of necessary replacements are key priorities for extended nuclear power plant operations and power uprate considerations. https://www.energy.gov/ne/materials-aging-and-degradation”.
100% of thermal stress was treated as nonlinear gradient stress and linear bending stress was about 12% of the moment stress. Structural Integrity’s (SI’s) review of the stress terms used in piping analysis show that pressure stress does create bending stress in components…
EPRI Report 3002014121 “Development of Fatigue Usage Life and Gradient Factors” has developed fatigue usage adjustment factors that account for: 1) increased cyclic life associated with the growth of potential engineering size fatigue cracks in thicker components (thickness factor, TF; also called life factor, LF), and 2) the presence of through-thickness stress gradients (gradient factor, GF). (TF is used in the issued Code Case.)These factors are applied to cumulative usage factor, U, in air.
Optimizing the inspection interval for high-reliability components whose examinations have a significant outage impact.
Welds and similar components in nuclear power plants are subject to periodic examination under ASME Code, Section XI.Typically, examinations are performed during every ten-year inspection interval using volumetric examination techniques, or a combination of volumetric and surface examination techniques.Nuclear plants worldwide have performed numerous such inspections over the plant history with few service induced flaws identified.Since personnel health and safety, radiation exposure, and overall outage costs associated with these inspections can be significant, Structural Integrity (SI) was contracted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to review the technical bases for the inspection intervals for select components.The goal was to determine whether the frequency of current inspection requirements was justified or could be optimized (i.e., reduced in order to devote more attention to higher-value inspections and thereby maximize overall plant safety).Special priority was given to components demonstrating an exceptional history of reliability and whose examinations have a significant outage impact.
https://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/News-View-Volume-48-Examination-Optimization-for-PWR-and-BWR-Components.jpg363668Structural Integrityhttps://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/logo-name-4-930x191-1.pngStructural Integrity2020-09-30 18:10:392021-07-28 18:27:43News & Views, Volume 48 | Examination Optimization for PWR and BWR Components
Environmentally-Assisted Fatigue (EAF) screening is used to systematically identify limiting locations for managing EAF effects on Class 1 reactor coolant pressure boundary components wetted by primary coolant.This article provides an overview of the methods developed and used by Structural Integrity (SI) for Class 1 components having explicit fatigue analyses performed using ANSI/ASME B31.7(1) and ASME Section III(2).A future article will discuss how this is performed for Class 1 piping designed and analyzed to ASME/ANSI B31.1(3).
As plants enter their initial or subsequent license renewal period one of the requirements is to show that fatigue (including environmental effects) is adequately managed.For some locations in pressurized water reactors (PWRs), it can be difficult to demonstrate an environmental fatigue usage factor less than the code allowable value of 1.0.Therefore, plants are increasingly turning to flaw tolerance evaluations using the rules of the ASME Code, Section XI, Appendix L.Appendix L analytically determines an inspection interval based on the time it takes for a postulated flaw (axial or circumferential) to grow to the allowable flaw size.For surge line locations, this evaluation can be very complex, as the crack growth assessment must consider many loadings, such as: insurge/outsurge effects, thermal stratification in the horizontal section of the line, thermal expansion of the piping (including anchor movements), and internal pressure.Trying to envelope all of these loads using traditional tools can lead to excess conservatism in the evaluation, and short inspection intervals that reduce the value of an Appendix L evaluation.
https://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/News-View-Volume-48-SI-FatiguePro-Version-4.0-Crack-Growth-Module-Application-Case-Study-Complex-Multi-Cycle-Nuclear-Transients.jpg363668Structural Integrityhttps://www.structint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/logo-name-4-930x191-1.pngStructural Integrity2020-09-30 18:00:082021-07-28 18:27:44News & Views, Volume 48 | SI:FatiguePro Version 4.0 Crack Growth Module – Application Case Study Complex Multi-Cycle Nuclear Transients
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