Session: MF-04-01 Fitness-For-Service and Failure Assessment

Paper Number: 61834

Start Time: Tuesday, July 13, 2021, 09:00 AM

61834 - European Project ATLAS+: Large Scale Fracture Mechanics Tests on Ferritic Pipes 

The 4-years European project ATLAS+ (Advanced Structural Integrity Assessment Tools for Safe long Term Operation) has been launched in June 2017. One of its objectives is to study the transferability of material ductile properties from small scale specimens to large scale components and validate some advanced tools for structural integrity assessment.

The study of properties transferability is based on a wide experimental programme which includes a full set of fracture experiments conducted on conventional fracture specimens and large scale components (mainly pipes).

Three materials are considered in the programme : a ferritic steel WB36 typical from secondary feed water line in German PWR reactors, an aged stainless steel austenitic weld representative of EPR design and a typical VVER austenitic dissimilar weld (DMW).

This paper describes preparation, realisation and analysis of large scale tests performed on the ferritic steel WB 36 (15NiCuMoNb5). These large scale tests consisted on four point bendind tests on pipings conducted at room temperature. Two configurations of cracks (shape, size and location) were tested. With the first configuration (FP1), with a through wall crack, a large ductile tearing was obtained. For the second configuration (FP2), with an external semi-elliptical crack, cleavage was obtained after a limited ductile tearing.

Presenting Author: Anna Dahl EDF

Authors:

Willy Vincent EDF
Anna Dahl EDF