Structural integrity assessment procedure for Europe - of the SINTAP programme overview

摘要

The structural integrity assessment procedure (SINTAP) project, part-funded by the European Union under the Brite-Euram scheme, commenced in April 1996 and was completed in April 1999. It has involved a consortium of seventeen organisations from nine European countries, the aim of the project being to derive a unified structural integrity evaluation method for use by European industry. Although many such methods did and do exist, most have conflicting approaches, unspecified levels of empiricism or do not fully reflect the performance of modern materials or the current state of knowledge. The SINTAP project covered both modelling and experimental work and a large element of the project was concerned with the transfer of knowledge and data between industries and scientific organisations together with its compilation and interpretation to provide the required solutions. The culmination of this work is a procedure which is applicable to a wide cross-section of users because of its ability to offer routes of varying complexity, reflecting data quality and the preference of the final interpretation required by the user.