The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) operates approximately 300 aging, carbon steel, layered pressure vessels (LPVs) that were designed and manufactured prior to ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel (B&PV) code requirements. Fitness-for-service assessments and traditional evaluations of these non-code vessels is a challenge due to unique uncertainties that are not present in code vessels, such as missing construction records and the use of proprietary materials in construction. Furthermore, many of the steels used in these non-code vessels are at a risk of cleavage fracture at low temperatures within the operating temperature ranges of the NASA sites where these vessels are installed. Additionally, the stress state in critical regions of the LPVs, such as the longitudinal seam welds and circumferential welds, is uncertain due to weld residual stresses (WRS), geometric discontinuities, and stress concentrations in weld connections. In order to guide non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and assessment of the circumferential welds and account for uncertainties in these non-code LPVs, probabilistic critical initial flaw size (CIFS) and critical crack size (CCS) analyses were performed for eleven locations of interest within the head-to-shell and shell-to-shell circumferential welds of three demonstration LPVs.
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Themes: Probabilistic Aspects of Fatigue Crack Growth and Fracture: Frameworks, Tools, and Applications
INTERMITTENCY IN FATIGUE CRACK GROWTH AND FATIGUE STRIATIONS
The fatigue crack growth rate exhibits apparent self-similarity as it grows as a power of the stress intensity factor (the Paris–Erdogan law). We have studied the fatigue crack growth in two aluminum alloys (Al-1050 and Al-5005) using optical methods and found that the crack tip advances in an intermittent way, characterized by a power-law distribution of crack tip jump sizes. The exponent of the distribution is around two – higher than what is usually observed in avalanching systems – and there is a cutoff that increases with increasing crack velocity. If the generally accepted one-to-one correspondence between the crack tip advancement per cycle and the fatigue striation lines on the fracture surface holds, one should expect a similar distribution for the striation line spacings. We have performed post-mortem fractography using scanning electron microscopy and, by automatically tracking the striation spacings, we indeed see a similar power-law distribution with a cutoff and an exponent around two.
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APPLICATIONS OF THE EXTREMELY LOW PROBABILITY OF RUPTURE (XLPR) CODE
To analyze the integrity of piping components in nuclear power plants (NPPs), the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research and the Electric Power Research Institute jointly developed a probabilistic fracture mechanics computer code. The Extremely Low Probability of Rupture (xLPR) code simulates crack initiation and growth from fatigue and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) degradation mechanisms and other aspects of piping component structural integrity. This presentation provides an overview of the NRC staff’s applications of the xLPR code since its public release in 2020 to assist in risk-informed regulatory evaluations of leak-before-break (LBB) analyses for pressurized water reactor piping systems with dissimilar metal welds susceptible to SCC. Potential use of the xLPR code to estimate loss of coolant accident (LOCA) frequencies and to interface with artificial intelligence machine learning (AI/ML) models are also discussed.
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