A Study on the Evaluation Technology of Welds Integrity in Nuclear Power Plants

The final goal of this study is to develop the core technologies applicable to the design, operation and maintenance of welds in nuclear structures. This study includes predicting microstructure changes and residual stress for welded parts of nuclear power plant components. Furthermore, researches are performed on evaluating fatigue, corrosion, and hydrogen induced cracking and finally constructs systematically integrated evaluation system for structural integrity of nuclear welded structures. In this study, metallurgical and mechanical approaches have been effectively coordinated considering real welding phenomena in the fields of welds properties such as microstructure, composition and residual stress, and in the fields of damage evaluations such as fatigue, corrosion, fatigue crack propagation, and stress corrosion cracking. Evaluation techniques tried in this study can be much economical and effective in that it uses theoretical/semi-empirical but includes many additional parameters that can be introduced in real phenomena such as phase transformation, strength mismatch and residual stress. It is clear that residual stress makes great contribution to fatigue and stress corrosion cracking. Therefore the mitigation techniques have been approached by reducing the residual stress of selected parts resulting in successful conclusions.