Assuring Structural Integrity Of Steel Reactor Pressure Vessels

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 16 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (925 download)

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Download or read book Reactor Pressure Vessel Structural Integrity Research written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Development continues on the technology used to assess the safety of irradiation-embrittled nuclear reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) containing flaws. Fracture mechanics tests on RPV steel, coupled with detailed elastic-plastic finite-element analyses of the crack-tip stress fields, have shown that (1) constraint relaxation at the crack tip of shallows surface flaws results in increased data scatter but no increase in the lower-bound fracture toughness, (2) the nil ductility temperature (NDT) performs better than the reference temperature for nil ductility transition (RT{sub NDT}) as a normalizing parameter for shallow-flaw fracture toughness data, (3) biaxial loading can reduce the shallow-flaw fracture toughness, (4) stress-based dual-parameter fracture toughness correlations cannot predict the effect of biaxial loading on a shallow-flaw fracture toughness because in-plane stresses at the crack tip are not influenced by biaxial loading, and (5) an implicit strain-based dual-parameter fracture toughness correlation can predict the effect of biaxial loading on shallow-flaw fracture toughness. Experimental irradiation investigations have shown that (1) the irradiation-induced shift in Charpy V-notch vs temperature behavior may not be adequate to conservatively assess fracture toughness shifts due to embrittlement, and (2) the wide global variations of initial chemistry and fracture properties of a nominally uniform material within a pressure vessel may confound accurate integrity assessments that require baseline properties.