Heartbeat model for component failure time in simulation of plant behavior

As part of the Department of Energy's "Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program" (LWRSP), we are developing a methodology and associated tools for risk-informed characterization of safety margin that can be used to support decision-making about plant life extension beyond the first license renewal. Beginning with the traditional discussion of "margin" in terms of a "load" (a physical challenge to system or component function) and a "capacity" (the capability of that system or component to accommodate the challenge), we are developing the capability to characterize realistic probabilistic load and capacity spectra, reflecting both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty in system behavior. This way of thinking about margin comports with work done in the last 10 years. However, current capabilities to model in this way are limited: it is currently possible, but difficult, to validly simulate enough time histories to support quantification in realistic problems, and the treatment of environmental influences on reliability is relatively artificial in many existing applications. The INL is working on a next-generation safety analysis capability (widely referred to as "R7") that will enable a much better integration of reliability- and phenomenology-related aspects of margin. In this paper, we show how to implement cumulative damage ("heartbeat") models for component reliability that lend themselves naturally to being included as part of the phenomenology simulation. Implementation of this modeling approach relies on the way in which the phenomenology simulation implements dynamic time step management. Within this approach, component failures influence the phenomenology, and the phenomenology influences the component failures.