Calculation of stress intensity factors for surface cracks in steam generator tube sheets

摘要

The evaluation of critical flaw sizes in tube sheets has to overcome difficulties arising in the calculation of stress intensity factors for cracks going through one or several ligaments. This paper presents the results of finite elementcalculations performed with the program SYSTUS in order to determine KI values in function of defect depth, number of cracked ligaments, type of loadings.The complete set of results leads to simplified formulae for computing KI values with a very satisfactory accuracy.