Fracture behavior of shallow cracks in full-thickness clad beams from an RPV wall section

摘要

A testing program is described that utilizes full-thickness clad beam specimens to quantify fracture toughness for shallow cracks in weld material for which metallurgical conditions are prototypic of those found in reactor pressure vessels (RPVs). The beam specimens are fabricated from an RPV shell segment that includes weld, plate and clad material. Metallurgical factors potentially influencing fracture toughness for shallow cracks in the beam specimens include material gradients and material inhomogeneities in welded regions. The shallow-crack clad beam specimens showed a significant loss of constraint similar to that of other shallow-crack single-edge notch bend (SENB) specimens. The stress-based Dodds-Anderson scaling model appears to be effective in adjusting the test data to account for in-plane loss of constraint for uniaxially tested beams, but cannot predict the observed effects of out-of-plane biaxial loading on shallow-crack fracture toughness. A strain-based dual-parameter fracture toughness correlation (based on plastic zone width) performed acceptably when applied to the uniaxial and biaxial shallow-crack fracture toughness data.