Piping failures still remain a major cause of possible forced outages of power generating units for electric utilities. This paper presents a common approach to power industry piping remant life extension methods. The main emphasis of the approach is plant reliability, while the aproach places at least equal emphasis on safety. The aproach is basically a framework of guidelines and standards. The standards are necessary to ensure the quality assurance of power industry piping systems. The approach presneted in this paper has as its objective the correction, prevention and control of piping failures. The approach accommodates and integrates optimal design for new pipes and optimal remnant life design for the same pipes after they have bene in service, or for pipes already in service. This is acheived through the inclusion of the unit element stiffness matrices and load vector database and the support configuration database. Both databases are common to optimal design and optimal remnant life design. The support configuration database accounts for pipes supported from below (pipe supports) and for pipes supported from above (pipe hangers). Initially all possible supports are accepted as potential supports. The database is stored, and can be updated throughout the life of the piping system. The database contains responses due to unit loads at the potnetila supports as calculated by the support configuration algorithms. The algorithms yield an optimal design for new pipes, or the maximum remnant life design and its corresponding.
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