SIZE EFFECT ASSESSMENT OF KJc EXPERIMENTAL DATA USING THE TWO-STEP-SCALING METHOD

Abstract

The phenomenon of ductile-to-brittle transition (DBT) in ferritic steels, widely used in design of nuclear reactor pressure vessels, has been a pervasive semi-centennial research topic. Due to the extremely pronounced experimental data scatter, the statistical approach to characterization of this problem has become inevitable from the earliest analyses. In the present study, the fracture toughness parameters derived from the EURO fracture toughness dataset for 22NiMoCr37 reactor steel are used with the aim to explore the utility of the recently proposed two-step-scaling method. Two widely different temperatures (-154 °C and -91 °C; belonging to the lower shelf and the DBT transition regions of fracture toughness, in respect) are selected to demonstrate the accuracy of extrapolation and interpolation of the fracture toughness CDF (cumulative distribution function) and the pertinent issues related to the method application. The fracture toughness measure used is the critical value of the stress intensity factor used in the master curve KJc (MPa√m). The obtained predictions are in good agreement with the experimental results and well within the inherent experimental data scatter. The prediction of the fracture toughness CDF obtained by extrapolation using the novel two-step-scaling method is reasonably conservative.