Effects of Continuous Strain Rate Changing on Environmental Fatigue for Stainless Steels in PWR Environment

The strain rates in actual transients of operating plants are not constant and changing momentarily. A large number of fatigue tests under stepwise strain rate changing conditions were performed to develop a method for evaluating fatigue life under varying strain rate conditions. Based on these test results, a strain base integral model known as the named the modified rate approach method was developed and verified. However it was reported recently that in the case of sine wave fatigue tests in BWR environment, the fatigue life was two to six times longer than the fatigue life predicted by the modified rate approach method. For this paper, in order to confirm whether the same tendency is observed in PWR environment, fatigue tests of sine wave were performed of SS316 in simulated PWR water environment. As the result, the difference of fatigue life by sine wave test reported in BWR environment was not observed between experimental and predicted life in PWR environment and the modified rate approach method was applicable under continuous strain rate changing condition.