Plan on test to failure of a steel containment vessel model

This paper describes the plan for a test to failure of a steel containment vessel model. The test specimen proposed for this test is a scale model representing certain features of an improved BWR MARK-2 containment vessel. The objective of this test is to investigate the ultimate structural behavior of the model by incrementally increasing the internal pressure, at ambient temperature, until failure occurs. Pre- and posttest analyses will be conducted to predict and evaluate the results of this test. The main objective of these analyses to validate, by comparisons with the experimental data, the analytical methods used to evaluate the structural behavior of an actual containment vessel under severe accident conditions. This experiment is part of a cooperative program between the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation (NUPEC), the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL).