Ageing management of cooling towers EDFs program

Thierry Roure1, Yves Crolet2

1

EDF SEPTEN Technical leader, Villeurbanne, France, thierry.roure@edf.fr 2 EDF SEPTEN Civil engineer, Villeurbanne, France, yves.crolet@edf.fr

ABSTRACT:
EDF operates a large fleet of cooling towers for its thermal and nuclear plants. The ageing of their atmospheric cooling tower shells is periodically monitored. Proactive maintenance strategies require ranking the towers according to the risk of failure and the observed damage. The ranking includes all sorts of monitoring data acquired at the plant: foundation settlements, material properties, quantified crack patterns, shell deformation, meteorological data, and corrosion. The numerical tool suite includes a finite element analysis of each tower according to the different identified possible loadings

Keywords: cooling tower, ranking, monitoring, failure risk index, reinforced concrete, cracks, corrosion
During the past few years, EDF achieved a complete analysis of the failure modes of cooling towers and this benchmark concluded that

1. Introduction
EDFs operates 58 nuclear pressurized water reactors (PWR) in France, built from 1974 to the middle of the 1990s (Fig.1). When necessary for the cooling process of the NPP, cooling towers were built. These structures, although not safety related, are important for the production. In addition to the maintenance optimization process, EDF has launched an ageing management of cooling towers process based on three indicators.

The main reason of failure for these structures over an extended period of operation is linked to the corrosion of the rebar reinforcement, Considering the current design of cooling towers, such a structure would only collapse under mechanical loads if corrosion occurred.

Thus three indicators were defined to confirm and adapt if needed the maintenance program of cooling towers: Identification of realistic stress state under mechanical loadings and historical settlements Analysis of the global corrosion risk and its evolution, Comparison between systematic cracking and cracking issued from inspections.

Fig. 1. Nuclear power plants in France

2. Cooling tower geometry

Cooling Tower consist in : a concrete shell, concrete columns , a concrete foundation ring, a concrete basin (independent from columns and foundations), concrete fill support structure, concrete water distribution system. The shell is supported by a columns (Vshape, X-shape or straight vertical, Fig. 3) linked together by an annular footing which transmits loads to the ground.

The shell was designed in form of hyperboloid of variable thickness along its height. The height of EDFs cooling towers shell ranges from 120m to 180m with a diameter at the base that ranges from 100m up to 140m. The geometry is specific for each plant although there is no significant difference (Fig. 2). The thickness at the throat level is about 20 cm and the shell tend to be thicker at the top so as to increase the strength of the structure in these specifica areas, where stresses tend to be more important.
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Fig. 3. Support of shell Fig. 2. Geometry of Shell (Height and Radius)

3. Assessment and inspection

Operating experience has demonstrated that periodic inspection, maintenance, and repair are essential elements of an overall program to maintain an acceptable level of reliability for structures over their service life.

resilient to loadings such as weight, wind, settlements, temperature, moisture, and even seismic events.

3.2 Degradation mechanisms

Is is now widely known that cooling towers are resilient against mechanical and thermal loadings. The graph below presents the load factor of a cooling tower including weight, temperature and wind loadings. A load factor of 1.0 is obtained fo the design wind. The failure occurs for a wind load factor of 2.3, which entails a 2.3 safety factor margin on the wind level.

3.1 Operating experience

The first generation of cooling towers suffered tragic failures and even collapses due to a lack of knowledge of the behaviour of the structure or insufficient design. This led to the major event of Ferrybridge where three out of eight cooling towers collapsed in 1965 (Fig. 4).

Fig. 5. Wind load factor and thermal influence [1]

Other studies have shown that settlements, moisture, cracking, geometry defaults, have no significant effect on the wind load factor and do not tend to reduce the safety margin of the structure. However this load factor may dramatically decrease if corrosion of the rebars occurs. This corrosion is due to the carbonation of the concrete:
Fig. 4. Collapse of Ferrybridge CT (UK) in 1965

Other events (Ardeer, Bouchain, ...) led the industry to study more these structures so as to prevent such failures and to create a second generation of cooling towers, more 3

4. Preventive maintenance program

By using monitoring data EDF is able to manage ageing process of its cooling towers. But anticipation of its maintenance program remains difficult. Moreover, EDF would like to increase lifetime of its nuclear power plants from 40 years up to 60 years. According to its current monitoring organization, which provides some data, and by using experimental and theoretical knowledge, EDF had launch additional indicators in order to provide cooling towers classification and anticipation of maintenance program and to take into account the corrosion of the rebars and its evolution. These indicators are described as follows.

Fig. 6. Wind load factor and corrosion influence [2]

Therefore, is has been decided to monitor the carbonation of the concrete and the corrosion of the rebars by concrete coring measurements.

3.3 Inspections
EDF maintenance program includes periodic inspections of its cooling towers. The inspections carried out are: Visual inspections, Topographical survey, Shell shape measurements.

4.1 Cracking
A comparison between maximum theoretical cracks spacing and realistic one is made for each cooling tower. An example of cracks inspection data is shown hereafter:

Visual inspections are done via remote systems and gives reliable data on cracking positions and patterns thus giving a first estimation of the state of the cooling tower. These inspections may also detect corrosion of the rebars. Settlements are determined for each support by topographical surveys. These measurements are directly used for stress state computation of the structure.
Fig. 7. Example of crack inspection data

4.2 Corrosion indicator risk

This indicator is based on carbonation depth and steel bars cover. On-site campaign (Fig. 8) is associated in order to provide the data required to perform corrosion analysis. 4

This analysis shall be performed by separated shell surface in different zones which presents similar structural behaviour. Probabilistic analyze is used to compute the average risk for each zone. For each zone, carbonation theoretical evolution (Fig. 9) is fitted by using campaign results and compared with rebars location.

quantitative index based on failure analysis of reinforced concrete. It includes two modules: a mechanical module which is the core module an ageing module considering the carbonation and corrosion.

The first module computes the behavior of cooling towers under five types of loading: soil differential settlement, self-weight, moisture transport, temperature and wind. By comparison with the ultimate resisting capacity of the reinforced concrete cross section, a risk index map is produced for each tower. The second module aims to anticipate the corrosion depth of reinforcement steel of the towers in the future. Two kinds of corrosion are considered: the corrosion due to pre-existing cracking and the corrosion induced by carbonation. The results will be used to build corrosion risk maps but also as updated inputs in the first module for the failure index mapping of the towers. This module is under on-going developments at EDF R&D.

Fig. 8. Example of campaign expected locations

Fig. 9. Carbonation theorical evolution

a) b)

4.3 Realistic stress state of the shell

Deterministic finite element method is used to provide as realistic as possible stress state into the shell from load and historical informations (settlements, construction stage, wind event). This methodology is built in the finite element suite SALOMEMECA [3] in order to calculate a

Fig. 10 : a) Finite element parametric meshing developed and used in the ranking methodology b) computation of the mechanical response to high wind loading (strain map)

5. Conclusion
The proposed methodology is end-user oriented as it requires only a tower identity record containing the measured data mentioned above, construction details and general design information (geometry, material). Then, the tool suite analyzes the input records and run the software SALOME-MECA for a finite element analysis. A specific post-processor produces the output risk index maps. For the sake of illustration, we present in this paper some calculation results of EDF SEPTEN, a EDFs nuclear engineering centre. At the moment, only quantitative data are used in the computation tools to provide local mechanical risk indexes. Acknowledging the complexity of the structural behavior of such structures, expertbased knowledge must be included in the final global ranking index. It is envisioned to incorporate this functionality in a future version of the existing tool suite.

6. References
[1] Design for durability of natural draught cooling towers by life-cycle Simulations, Kratzig, Konke, Mancevski, Gruber, 1998 [2] Influence of corrosion rebars, Kratzig, Gruber, 1996 [3] http://www.code-aster.org