Safety In Nuclear Power Steam Piping Part II: Some Background on Engineer Evans Goodling

Evans Goodling? An engineer? Who is that? Until last month I had almost no idea.

The ASME 2022 PVP conference in Las Vegas last month changed that. There I met someone who knows Goodling personally and worked with him in ASME for many years. He gave me some background on how Goodling came up with his steam hammer load prediction method. Which is what my papers challenged at PVP.

This piqued my curiosity about Goodling and so I did a little digging.

First, a recap from my blog last month – "Steam Piping in Nuclear Power Plants Is Not As Safe As Commonly Believed". I presented two papers at ASME PVP on Steam Hammer. The method most used today was published by Evans Goodling. My papers show that Goodling's Method does not provide reliably conservative load estimates.

Before Goodling published his steam hammer method in the 1980's, there were apparently no good guidelines to design steam pipe supports in power station piping. So, Goodling and his colleagues created one. Goodling worked at Gilbert/Commonwealth in Reading, Pennsylvania (Northeast USA for international readers). His company later became part of Parsons, then WorleyParsons, and still exists today as Worley.

With AFT just getting formed as a company in 1994, as a still young engineer I made my first visit to the Reading office (then called Parsons) in 1996. I may have met Goodling at the lunch presentation I made that day. If not, I definitely met some of his colleagues.

The common acquaintance engineer I met at the PVP conference attended my two presentations of my papers and came up to me afterwards to talk. Prior to that I had never met this gentleman. He told me that he was still in contact with Goodling and that Goodling was an open-minded individual who would appreciate my papers – even though I critiqued his method. He was planning to reach out to Goodling and send him copies of papers if he could still reach him. I thought that was pretty cool.

I then searched Google for Evans Goodling and actually found a YouTube video of him shown below! Here he reminisces about his life and spends some of his time talking about his engineering career.