Fracture Assessment of a Clad Steel Using the SINTAP Defect Assessment Procedure

In many critical industries such as nuclear, chemical and petrochemical industries, bi-material components in the form of clad plates are used due to their superior environmental and mechanical properties. During the service life of these bi-material components, cracks or crack-like defects may develop in the clad layer and penetrate into the substrate. The assessment of the integrity of such a cracked as well as complex structure would be an important task. Hence, this study is aimed at applying the recently developed European Structural Integrity Assessment Procedure (SINTAP) to a through thickness centre cracked clad steel wide plate to validate the procedure for this type of bi-material structure. Based on the available input data, various assessment levels as well as two different assessment routes, namely crack driving force (CDF) and failure assessment diagram (FAD), can be used for predicting the failure loads. In principle both routes should provide similar results and this has been verified by having very similar results for both SINTAP routes. Furthermore, the degree of conservatism has been reduced by using higher analysis levels of SINTAP.