Hello Sir! Good Afternoon!

Today I stand before you to speak about my internship in Bhabha Atomic

Research Centre, where I was involved in the design and analysis of multi ply bellows expansion
joints for hot shut down passive valves.

Now, what is bellows? Bellows are flexible structural elements, used to absorb thermal expansion
while maintaining system pressure, meaning, they basically, expand or contract to compensate for
the relative moment between two pipes, hence acting as expansion joint in a variety of uses such as,
actuators, seals and valves.

Bellows nomenclature involves 5 parameters, Db, inner dia of bellows, q, pitch between two
convolutions, N, number of convolutions, n, number of plies, t thickness of a single ply, w , or height
of a convolution.

In Station Blackout/reactor shutdown, core decay heat is removed by 8 Isolation condensers(ICs)

submerged in gravity driven pool, passive valves are provided on the downstream of each IC. On
increase of steam drum pressure beyond a certain value, passive valves start opening, establish
natural circulation between the Steam Drums and ICs, the bellows start expanding and the spring
starts contracting. The HSPV opening initiates steam flow to occur from SD to IC, like flowing steam
gets condensed in ICs, and condensed low temperature water comes back to SDs, hence, they are
used to limit steam drum pressure and so, they’re termed as Hot ShutDown Passive Valves. Passive
because HSPV is a self-acting valve, requiring no external energy.

The problem statement of HSPV, required the design of bellows with three changing variables(n –
number of plies, t-thickness of a ply, N-number of convolutions), like, n- 3/4/5, t – 0.5 m, 1 mm, 1.5
mm and the number of convolutions can be between 30-50. The code used for the design of bellows
was the Expansion Joint Manufacturer’s Association code.

From EJMA code, we get the following stress equations for the different membrane stress, bending
stress, fatigue life and the critical pressure due to column instability and planar instability, the code
gives the constraints for the stresses, fatigue life and instability.

The objective functions to be minimized given the following constraints, are, the first one being,
mass per unit extension, which has to be minimized because of two contradicting conditions, mass is
to be minimized because of less weight while extension is to be maximized for better flexibility.

The next objective function is fatigue life, which is based on the designer’s criteria.

For the design problem, there are, in total 6 behaviour constraints, 6 boundary constraints,
algorithm used is exhaustive search and sorting is done to find the optimal design for f1 and f2.

Finite element analysis of bellows was done given the following assumptions, and pressure and
displacement cases were separated to distinguish between stress due to pressure and stresses due
to displacement.

It is seen that the obtained Finite element analysis stresses matches with those of the design report
calculations for the same bellows.

Also, after comparing thee EJMA and the FEA stresses, we can see that S3 and S5 are considerably
different because of the change in maximum stress location in FEA, whereas EJMA considering the
mid point crown and the root to be the locaaion for the maximum sresses. Also, S2 is also different
since EJMA hasn’t considered the combined effect of membrane and bending in side walls. S4 and
S6, on the other hand, match quite accurately.