Assessment of Fatigue and Fracture on a Tee-Junction of LMFBR Piping Under Thermal Striping Phenomenon

This paper deals with the industrial problem of thermal striping damage on the French prototype fast breeder reactor, Phenix and it was studied in coordination with the research program of IAEA. The thermomechanical and fracture mechanics evaluation procedure of thermal striping damage on the tee-junction of the secondary piping using Green's function method and standard FEM is presented. The thermohydraulic(T/H) loading condition used in the present analysis is the random type thermal loads computed by T/H analysis on the turbulent mixing of the two flows with different temperatures. The thermomechanical fatigue damage was evaluated according to ASME code section 111 subsection NH. The results of the fatigue analysis showed that fatigue failure would occur at the welded joint within 90,000 hours of operation. The assessment for the fracture behavior of the welded joint showed that the crack would be initiated at an early stage in the operation. It took 42,698.9 hours for the crack to propagate up to 5 mm along the thickness direction. After then, however, the instability analysis, using tearing modulus, showed that the crack would be arrested, which was in agreement with the actual observation of the crack. An efficient analysis procedure using Green's function approach for the crack propagation problem under random type load was proposed in this study. The analysis results showed good agreement with those of the practical observations.