News - Page 9 of 18 - Structural Integrity Associates

Structural Integrity Associates Appoints Anthony (Tony) W. Robinson as Senior Vice President & Chief Nuclear Officer

Structural Integrity Associates Appoints Anthony (Tony) W. Robinson as Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer

January 25, 2021/in Company News, Nuclear News/by Structural Integrity

Structural Integrity Associate, Inc. (SI) is pleased to announce that Anthony (Tony) W. Robinson will be joining Structural Integrity as the Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer, effective January 4, 2021. Tony spent more than 25 years (collectively) at Framatome (formerly AREVA, Inc. and predecessor companies), and most recently was the Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering. He previously held roles of Senior Vice President Customer Accounts & Government Affairs, Vice President New Builds North America, and Vice President New Builds Business Development. Additionally, he was the Vice President US Nuclear Services for BWXT from 2013 – 2016.

“With nearly 30 years of progressive executive leadership in diverse areas of nuclear energy, Tony brings a wealth of industry knowledge and experience, and we are very excited to have him join the SI Team, commented Mark Marano, SI CEO. “I have had the opportunity to work with Tony in the past and his collaborative leadership skills along with his ability to work closely with both customers and partners to ensure lasting and mutually beneficial relationships meet our preferred partnership objectives”.

Tony holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Akron, attended the Executive MBA program at Kent State University, and is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in the state of Ohio.

Structural Integrity Associates, Inc. is an employee owned specialty engineering and services company providing structural integrity assessment insights and services to achieve asset management excellence across multiple industries including Nuclear, Fossil, Oil & Gas, and critical infrastructure.

Structural Integrity Associates Food and Donations Collection for Angels & Sparrows

December 28, 2020/in Community Outreach, Company News/by Structural Integrity

This past Holiday Season, the Charlotte office of Structural Integrity collected donations for Angels and Sparrows Soup Kitchen, whose mission is to fight hunger in Huntersville and the surrounding area.

Structural Integrity Associates Achieves Milestone with Pegasus Code Development

December 4, 2020/in Company News, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Fuel/by Structural Integrity

On October 28^th, the Structural Integrity (SI) Nuclear Fuel Technology Team achieved a major milestone in completing the first Verification & Validation phase in the development of its nuclear fuel performance and behavior code Pegasus^©. “This is a significant step by the SI Team” commented Vick Nazareth, SI Fuel Director. “We have been developing Pegasus^© since 2017 to incorporate cutting edge computational technology and four decades of fuel behavior modeling and analysis expertise into a software program”. The code addresses a need for deeper fuel integrity insights within the nuclear industry to achieve next level fuel performance and licensing. Dr. Joe Rashid, Scientist and Senior Technology Developer of the code added “this code will analyze fuel behavior through the entire fuel cycle from initial startup to used-fuel storage”.

SI announced the development of Pegasus^© in the SI newsletter in 2019, Introducing Pegasus: State-of-the-Art Nuclear Fuel Behavior with the objective of enhancing the fidelity of fuel behavior and performance in support of advanced fuel technologies. The Pegasus^© code will go through additional validation testing over the next several months to meet a production roll-out in early 2021 in support of fuel performance behavior analysis across a broad spectrum of light water reactor and advanced reactor fuel designs.

” I am proud of the SI Fuel Team”, said Mark Marano, SI CEO.” This milestone exemplifies our ability to provide innovative structural integrity solutions for clients across structures, systems, components, water chemistry and nuclear fuel.”

Structural Integrity is an employee-owned specialty engineering and services company providing innovative engineering solutions and services to achieve asset management excellence across multiple industries including Nuclear, Fossil, Oil & Gas, Renewables, and Critical Infrastructure.

Executive Director of Project Management Nuclear Business Development Leader

October 26, 2020/in Company News/by Structural Integrity

Mike comes to SI following tenures at Westinghouse Electric and Framatome. During his 25 year career in the nuclear industry, Mike has held a variety of leadership roles that spanned operations and business development. Selected accomplishments in the operations realm during that time included building and leading the Westinghouse Balance of Plant Engineering Department that included over 100 engineers, and leading the commercial deployment of a new alloy 600 mitigation technology in the US. From a commercial standpoint, Mike led the Business Development Departments for two different 75+ Million dollar businesses to achieve substantial top-line growth.

Mike will bring the broad range of experiences to SI to drive improvement in project management in order to achieve next-level performance and customer satisfaction. Mike will also hold a secondary role of Business Development in the SI Nuclear Business Unit, where he will use his experience and industry contacts to promote SI engineering technology to the global fleet.

News & Views, Volume 48 | Increase in Reinspection Intervals for BWR Reactor Internals

September 30, 2020/in Dick Mattson, Minghao Qin, News and Views, Nuclear Asset Integrity, Nuclear Energy/by Structural Integrity

By: Dick Mattson and Minghao Qin

A U.S. BWR utility contracted with Structural Integrity (SI) to review their current reinspection guidance documents relative to those contained in the BWRVIP inspection guidelines, the purpose of which was two-fold:

Are current reinspection guidelines compliant with industry requirements?
Are there components where reinspection intervals could possibly be extended?

News & View, Volume 48 | Acoustic Resonance

News & Views, Volume 48 | Acoustic Resonance

September 30, 2020/in Andrew Crompton, Mark Jaeger, News and Views, Vibration/by Structural Integrity

By: Mark Jaeger and Andrew Crompton

Acoustic resonance is a phenomenon in which an acoustic system amplifies sound waves whose frequency matches one of its own natural frequencies of vibration (its resonance frequencies).

in everyday life. In the most simple at home example, blowing air over the open end of a bottle. Blow too hard, nothing. Blow too soft, nothing. When done just right, the bottle produces a sound (audible vibration). Just like that, you have acoustic resonance. Every wind instrument in a band uses acoustic cavity resonance to produce music. Take a piece of flexible hose, spin it in the air until it whistles, again, acoustic resonance. When an acoustic cavity resonance happens inside piping systems, especially those with high energy flow, those seemingly harmless vibrations we illustrated above can cause serious damage. This phenomena can occur in nearly any industry, sometimes with benign consequences and other times with catastrophic results.

News & View, Volume 48 | Plant Materials Aging and Degradation

News & Views, Volume 48 | Plant Materials Aging and Degradation – Nuclear IGSCC Mitigation Optimization and Equipment Advances

September 30, 2020/in Chemistry, Continuous Noble Metal Injection (CNMI), Erica Libra-Sharkey, News and Views, Nuclear Energy/by Structural Integrity

By: Erica Libra-Sharkey

INDUSTRY CHALLENGE

From the US Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, “The demanding environments of an operating nuclear reactor may impact the ability of a broad range of materials to perform their intended function over extended service periods. Routine surveillance and repair/replacement activities can mitigate the impact of this degradation; however, failures still occur. With reactors being licensed to operate for periods up to 60 years, with further extensions under consideration, and power uprates being planned, many of the plant systems, structures, and components will be expected to tolerate more demanding environments for longer periods. The longer plant operating lifetimes may increase the susceptibility of different systems, structures, and components to degradation and may introduce new degradation modes.

While all components potentially can be replaced, decisions to simply replace components may not be practical or the most economically favorable option. Therefore, understanding, controlling, and mitigating materials degradation processes and establishing a sound technical basis for long-range planning of necessary replacements are key priorities for extended nuclear power plant operations and power uprate considerations. https://www.energy.gov/ne/materials-aging-and-degradation”.

News & View, Volume 48 | Fatigue Adjustment Factors for Increased Cyclic Life

News & Views, Volume 48 | Fatigue Adjustment Factors for Increased Cyclic Life

September 30, 2020/in Bill Weitze, Fracture Mechanics, News and Views, Nuclear Asset Integrity, Nuclear Energy/by Structural Integrity

By: Bill Weitze

100% of thermal stress was treated as nonlinear gradient stress and linear bending stress was about 12% of the moment stress. Structural Integrity’s (SI’s) review of the stress terms used in piping analysis show that pressure stress does create bending stress in components…

EPRI Report 3002014121 “Development of Fatigue Usage Life and Gradient Factors” has developed fatigue usage adjustment factors that account for: 1) increased cyclic life associated with the growth of potential engineering size fatigue cracks in thicker components (thickness factor, TF; also called life factor, LF), and 2) the presence of through-thickness stress gradients (gradient factor, GF). (TF is used in the issued Code Case.) These factors are applied to cumulative usage factor, U, in air.

News & View, Volume 48 | Examination Optimization for PWR and BWR Components

News & Views, Volume 48 | Examination Optimization for PWR and BWR Components

September 30, 2020/in Bob Grizzi, Dilip Dedhia, News and Views, Nuclear Asset Integrity, Nuclear Energy, Scott Chesworth/by Structural Integrity

By: Scott Chesworth, Bob Grizzi, and Dilip Dedhia

Optimizing the inspection interval for high-reliability components whose examinations have a significant outage impact.

Welds and similar components in nuclear power plants are subject to periodic examination under ASME Code, Section XI. Typically, examinations are performed during every ten-year inspection interval using volumetric examination techniques, or a combination of volumetric and surface examination techniques. Nuclear plants worldwide have performed numerous such inspections over the plant history with few service induced flaws identified. Since personnel health and safety, radiation exposure, and overall outage costs associated with these inspections can be significant, Structural Integrity (SI) was contracted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to review the technical bases for the inspection intervals for select components. The goal was to determine whether the frequency of current inspection requirements was justified or could be optimized (i.e., reduced in order to devote more attention to higher-value inspections and thereby maximize overall plant safety). Special priority was given to components demonstrating an exceptional history of reliability and whose examinations have a significant outage impact.

News & Views, Volume 48 | Environmentally-Assisted Fatigue – Screening and Managing EAF Effects in Class 1 Reactor Coolant Components

September 30, 2020/in Dave Gerber, News and Views, Nuclear Asset Integrity, Nuclear Energy, Terry Herrmann/by Structural Integrity

By: Dave Gerber and Terry Herrmann

Environmentally-Assisted Fatigue (EAF) screening is used to systematically identify limiting locations for managing EAF effects on Class 1 reactor coolant pressure boundary components wetted by primary coolant. This article provides an overview of the methods developed and used by Structural Integrity (SI) for Class 1 components having explicit fatigue analyses performed using ANSI/ASME B31.7⁽¹⁾ and ASME Section III⁽²⁾. A future article will discuss how this is performed for Class 1 piping designed and analyzed to ASME/ANSI B31.1⁽³⁾.