Application of a first-order method to estimate the failure probability of component subjected to thermal transients for optimization of design parameters

Okajima, Satoshi ; Mori, Takero ; Kikuchi, Norihiro  ; Tanaka, Masaaki  ; Miyazaki, Masashi

In this paper, we propose the simplified procedure to estimate failure probability of components subjected to thermal transient for the design optimization. Failure probability can be commonly used as an indicator of component integrity for various failure mechanisms. In order to reduce number of analyses required for one estimation, we have adopted the First Order Second Moment (FOSM) method as the estimation method of failure probability on the process of the optimization, and an orthogonal table in experiment design method is utilized to define conditions of the analyses for the evaluation of the input parameters for the FOSM method. The superposition of ramp responses is also utilized to evaluate the time history of thermal transient stress instead of finite element analysis. Through the demonstration study to optimize thickness of cylindrical vessel subjected to thermal transient derived from shutdown, we confirmed that the procedure can evaluate the failure probability depending on the cylinder thickness with practical calculation cost.