A SIMPLIFIED LARGE THIN PLATE MODEL FOR MODELING FRACTURE BEHAVIOR OF A HYDRIDED IRRADIATED ZR-2.5NB PRESSURE TUBE SPECIMEN WITH AN AXIAL CRACK

The crack tip opening displacements (CTODs) and the effective plastic strains ahead of the crack front in a hydrided irradiated Zr-2.5Nb pressure tube specimen with an axial crack are investigated using two 3-D finite element models in this paper. The first model is a pressure tube with 80 split circumferential hydrides distributed through the thickness ahead of the crack front. The second model is a large thin plate with a central crack with four split circumferential hydrides under symmetry/symmetry, free/symmetry and free/free constraint conditions. The results for CTOD indicate that the CTOD of the pressure tube specimen with 80 hydrides is slightly smaller than that for the large thin plate with the free/symmetry constraint condition and larger than that for the large thin plate with the symmetry/symmetry constraint condition. The effective plastic strain of the pressure tube specimen with 80 hydrides is smaller than that for the large thin plate with the free/symmetry constraint condition and larger than that for the large thin plate with the symmetry/symmetry constraint condition at large normalized loads. The computational results show that instead of modeling a full 3-D pressure tube with a larger number of hydrides, a large thin plate model with a limited number of hydrides can be used to efficiently determine the upper and lower bounds of the CTODs and the effective plastic strains ahead of the crack front in a pressure tube specimen.