PROBABILISTIC FRACTURE MECHANICS ANALYSIS MODELS FOR JAPANESE REACTOR PRESSURE VESSELS

Probabilistic fracture mechanics (PFM) analysis code PASCAL has been developed by Japan Atomic Energy Agency for structural integrity assessments of reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) by considering the inherent probabilistic distributions of various influence factors. For practical applications, several evaluation models are improved, and have been implemented into the current PASCAL code. In this paper, the improvements of PASCAL are introduced firstly, such as the evaluation method for undeiclad cracks, treatments of the complicated welding residual stress distribution, and evaluation models for the warm pre-stressing effect. In addition, the effects of these improvements on failure probability or failure frequency of RPVs are investigated by performing PFM analyses for domestic RPVs using PASCAL. From the analysis results, the effects of the improved evaluation models are discussed.