Effect of local plastic component on crack opening displacement and on J-integral of a circumferential penetrated crack

Abstract

This paper describes the effect of local plastic component on J-integral and crack opening displacement (COD) evaluation of a circumferential penetrated crack, applicable to the leak before break (LBB) assessment for sodium cooled fast reactor (SFR) components. J-integral and COD evaluation methods are generally formulated as a summation of elastic and plastic components, and so far many evaluation formulae based on these two components have been proposed. However, strictly, the plastic component consists of local plastic and fully plastic components. Many of the conventional evaluation methods consider only the fully plastic component as the plastic component. The reason for this is that the effect of the local plastic component is much smaller than that of the fully plastic component excluding materials with extremely small work hardening. In contrast, for materials with high yield stress and small work hardening, such as modified 9Cr-1Mo steel which is one of the candidate materials for SFR's piping, the effect of the local plastic component on J-integral and COD cannot be ignored. Therefore, the authors propose formulae taking the effect of local plastic component on J-integral and COD into account, based on finite element analysis (FEA) results, so that it is easy to apply to crack evaluation. The formulae will be employed in the guidelines on LBB assessment for SFR components published from Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME).