Failure and leakage through circumferential cracks in steam generator tubing during accident conditions

摘要

This paper derives analytical expressions for the burst pressure and crack opening area for PWR steam generator tubes with a single throughwall circumferential crack when extensive plastic deformation occurs at the crack section. The rest of thetube is assumed to respond either elastically or as an elastic-plastic material obeying power-law hardening. The tubes are assumed to be subjected to internal pressure loading only. Limited elastic-plastic finite-element analyses were conducted tovalidate the results.