Internal components in nuclear reactor pressure vessels are joined to the ferritic vessel by use of dissimilar metal welds which commonly include nickel base weld material Alloy 182. It has turned out that Alloy 182 sometimes is susceptible to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) for the operating environment in reactors. Tensile residual stress has a large influence on SCC and it is important to carefully characterize the residual stresses generated at manufacturing. The manufacturing of these welds includes welding Alloy 182 to the ferritic steel to form a buttering, post-weld heat treatment (PWHT) of the buttering, and finally attachment welding between the internal component and the buttering.

An experimental program was designed for measurement and numerical analysis for validation of residual stresses in a nickel base Alloy 182 weld between the core shroud support leg and reactor pressure vessel. Two full-scale mock-ups were manufactured according to the original procedures for the buttering to the ferritic steel and the final attachment weld to the core shroud support. The mock-up was also carefully designed to produce correct boundary conditions for the support leg. Measurements were performed by the deep-hole drilling technique (DHD/iDHD). The residual stress fields from welding and heat treatments were predicted by detailed numerical modelling. Comparison between the numerical results and the measurement results shows very good agreement and validates the predicted residual stresses. It was concluded that the PWHT of the vessel only partly relieve weld residual stresses in the nickel base buttering.

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