The Experimental Work in Support to ATLAS+ Project

The 4-years European project ATLAS+ project was launched in June 2017. Its main objective is to develop advanced structural assessment tools to address the remaining technology gaps for the safe and long term operation of nuclear reactor pressure coolant boundary systems. The transferability of ductile material properties from small scale fracture mechanics specimens to large scale components is one of the topics of the project. A large programme of experimental work is to be conducted in support of the development and validation of advanced tools for structural integrity assessment within the framework of the work-package 1 (WP 1): Design and execution of simulation oriented experiments to validate models at different scales. The experimental work is based on a full set of fracture mechanics experiments conducted on standard specimens and large scale components (several pipes and one mock-up), including a full materials characterization. Three materials are considered: a ferritic steel 15NiCuMoNb5 (WB 36) an aged austenitic stainless steel weld a VVER (eastern PWR) dissimilar metal weld (DMW) The paper presents the WP 1, the experimental programme and summarizes the first results. Copyright © 2018 ASME.