Vibration tests for failure mode analysis of piping system toward Natech risk assessment

Takito, Kiyotaka ; Furuya, Osamu*; Nakamura, Izumi*; Okuda, Yukihiko  

Natech stands for Natural Hazard Triggered Technological Accidents. The assessment of Natech and the implementation of appropriate measures have been highlighted by the accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), and the gas tank fire caused by the earthquake in Japan. However, the data related to the structural failure with the system function is not sufficient to carry out the assessment of Natech in industrial plants, not only at NPPs. Therefore, the authors have investigated piping failure modes under seismic input to refer to the relationship between piping failure modes and assurance of piping function. Moreover, the authors have already performed the elbow and tee loading tests, the shaking table tests on a simple piping system to observe the referred failure modes of small-bore carbon steel piping. As a result, the authors have shown two of the referred modes are an elbow collapse and the axial crack growth of an elbow. In addition, it observed bifurcating into collapse mode and low cycle fatigue mode due to the relation between the dead load and input acceleration level. Consequently, to observe the failure modes under more realistic configurations, the authors fabricated a three-dimensional pipe specimen with multiple elbows and performed vibration tests using the vibration table in this study. The test specimen was designed to observe an elbow collapse or the axial crack growth on an elbow and under shaking table test. From the above, this paper reports the overview of this study and the results of the vibration tests. Especially, it shows the observed two different failure modes, axial plus circumferential crack and not just an elbow collapse but the overall fall including deformation of multiple elements under the shaking table tests.