Prediction of fatigue crack initiation life in SA312 Type 304LN austenitic stainless steel straight pipes with notch

In the nuclear power plants, stainless steel is widely used for fabrication of various components such as piping and pipe fittings. These piping components are subjected to cyclic loading due to start up and shut down of the nuclear power plants. The application of cyclic loading may lead to initiation of crack at stress raiser locations such as nozzle to piping connection, crown of piping bends etc. of the piping system. Crack initiation can also take place from the flaws which have gone unnoticed during manufacturing. Therefore, prediction of crack initiation life would help in decision making with respect to plant operational life. The primary objective of the present study is to compile various analytical models to predict the crack initiation life of the pipes with notch. Here notch simulates the stress raisers in the piping system. As a part of the study, Coffin-Manson equations have been benchmarked to predict the crack initiation life of pipe with notch. Analytical models proposed by Zheng et al. [1], Singh et al. [2], Yang Dong et al. [25], Masayuki et al. [33] and Liu et al. [3] were compiled to predict the crack initiation life of SA312 Type 304LN stainless steel pipe with notch under fatigue loading. Tensile and low cycle fatigue properties were evaluated for the same lot of SA312 Type 304LN stainless steel as that of pipe test. The predicted crack initiation lives by different models were compared with the experimental results of three pipes under different frequencies and loading conditions. It was observed that the predicted crack initiation life is in very good agreement with experimental results with maximum difference of +/- 10.0%. (c) 2021 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The primary objective of this study is to predict the crack initiation life of pipes with notches in order to make decisions regarding the operational life of nuclear power plants. Through benchmarking different analytical models and comparing them with experimental results, it was found that the predicted crack initiation life is in very good agreement with the actual results.