Assessment of early, useful, and wear-out operating periods for liquid-metal centrifugal pumps

The Centralized Reliability Data Organization (CREDO) was founded at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1978 as a data base to support reliability, availability, and maintainability analyses of liquid-metal reactor components. Although {approximately}3,000 items were received or updated in the data base last fiscal year, the primary emphasis of CREDO has changed from data collection to probabilistic risk assessment support, preventive maintenance support, and data analysis. This paper discusses the results of an analysis to determine the early, useful, and wear-out operating periods of liquid-metal centrifugal pumps.