Abstract
When a crack is detected in a stainless steel piping system of a nuclear power plant during in-service inspections, failure bending moment can be predicted by limit load criterion in accordance with Appendix E-8 in the JSME S NA-1-2008 or Appendix C in the ASME Code Section XI. However, in these current codes, the limit load criterion is only provided for the case of a pipe containing a single crack with uniform depth, although independent multiple cracks, such as stress corrosion cracks, have actually been detected in the same cross section of stainless steel piping systems and their actual geometrical shapes are generally complex. In this paper, a method is proposed to predict the failure bending moment for a pipe containing multiple circumferential cracks with complex shapes and several numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of this method.
