Session: MF-06-01/11-01 Materials and Technologies for Nuclear Power Plants I and Small-scale and miniature mechanical testing (Joint with C&S)

Paper Number: 61555

Start Time: Tuesday, July 13, 2021, 05:00 PM

61555 - Development and Validation of Sub-Miniaturized Geometry for Bending Tests to Extract Tensile Properties of Materials for Nuclear and Fusion Applications 

This work contributes to the current design of high flux test module (HFTM), which is a test module for material qualification for DEMOnstration power plant (DEMO) and is described in details in [Nuclear Materials and Energy 16 (2018) 245–248 / Arbeiter, Diegele, et al.]. The qualification of the structural materials will require intensive study including neutron irradiation testing. Further sub-miniaturization of the currently defined HFTM matrix is desirable to invoke cost/time-reduced irradiation and subsequent testing. With this respect, all types of tests could be sub-divided into two categories: (i) design data and (ii) supplementary/screening data. This work is devoted to the development and validation of the sub-miniaturized samples to generate supportive data to enable pre-selection of materials as well as to guide the test regimes for standardized samples needed to generate design data. 

In this work, we investigate the possibility of using a simplified sub-size geometry to perform bending tests on various steels and tungsten grades, from which the extracted data will be linked to the tensile properties. The bending and tensile tests are simulated by finite element method (FEM) analysis, which includes the development of a computational algorithm to extract tensile properties of materials from sub-miniaturized three-point bending (SUB-3PB) tests with ANSYS software. A reverse engineering iterative subroutine based on an isotropic rate-sensitive plasticity model is programmed to extract the constitutive laws for a set of available SUB-3PB tests (various test temperature, strain rate etc), material microstructure (grain size, grain orientation, dislocation density) with unirradiated and neutron-irradiated specimens. 

Presenting Author: Alexander Bakaev SCK CEN

Authors:

Alexander Bakaev SCK CEN
Alexander Zinovev SCK CEN
Dmitry Terentyev SCK CEN
Chao Yin SCK CEN
Geert Berkmans SCK CEN