Reactor pressure vessel structural integrity research
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)
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.
- Research Organization:
- Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC (United States). Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research; Brookhaven National Lab., Upton, NY (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-84OR21400
- OSTI ID:
- 93874
- Report Number(s):
- NUREG/CP--0140-Vol.3; ON: TI95011768
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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