An Unstable Fracture Test of Circumferentially Cracked Type 304 Stainless Steel Pipes

Abstract

The authors are performing an unstable fracture test of circumferentially cracked pipes in order to investigate the possibility of mitigating the conservative assumption of guillotine break in light-water reactor pressure boundary piping. The tests were performed at 285°C and at 6.86 MPa using type 304 stainless steel pipes of 165.2 mm in diameter and 11.0 mm in thickness. It is concluded that the predicted fracture load by the net-section-stress approach is conservative in a limited range of crack dimensions.