Review and Benchmark of Calculation Methods on Piping Wall Thinning due to Erosion-corrosion in Nuclear Power Plants

Even though industry efforts have been quite effective in reducing the number of piping and equipment failures caused by Flow Accelerated Corrosion, piping and components will continue to degrade as plants age. Guidelines on where and how to inspect (software predictions), how to perform chemistry improvements to reduce damage rates, and proposals of  material upgrades for replaced components are challenged by new economic studies, reduced time outages, and personnel aging.Events over the past years on degradations and incidents due to Flow Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) in Nuclear Power Plants (NPP), such as :Mihama accident in 2004, Benchmark of the  Framatome's  Owners Group in 2005 on the existing prediction softwares, IAEA  International Conference on Flow Accelerated Corrosion in Moscow in 2009, EdF's International Conferences on Flow Accelerated Corrosion in France in 2008 and in 2010, have lead the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to organise a “Co-ordinated Research Project (CRP) on elaboration of Flow Accelerated Corrosion guidelines and benchmarking of prediction tools”. The IAEA announced this project at the Moscow conference on FAC in April 2009 and in the France conference in 2010 .