Reliability Evaluation for Steam Generator in a Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor

Abstract

SG (steam generator) is one of the most important equipment in fast reactors, the experience in design and operation of fast reactor worldwide show that failures of SG occurred frequently and often caused serious consequences, therefore it’s necessary to conduct reliability analysis on SG in design phase. FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) is used to identify all potential failure modes and filter out main failure modes. Then, qualitative analysis and quantitative calculation are carried out to evaluate main failure modes. Next, reliability of SG can be obtained by conducting Latin Hypercube Sampling. Analysis results show that the leakage probability of SG in 20 years is 0.130 219, and the most sensitive factor is the quality of weld in the junction of tubes and tube plate, and the SG meet its reliability requirement.