Abstract
The 4-year European project ATLAS+ (Advanced Structural Integrity Assessment Tools for Safe long Term Operation) was launched in June 2017. One of its objectives is to study the transferability of ductile material properties from small scale specimens to large scale components and validate some advanced tools for structural integrity assessment.
The study of properties transferability is based on a wide experimental program — within the framework of work-package 1 (WP 1) — which includes a full set of fracture experiments conducted on conventional fracture specimens and on large scale components (mainly pipes).
Three materials are considered in the program: a low-alloy ferritic steel 15NiCuMoNb5 (WB36) typical from feedwater line in German PWR, an aged austenitic stainless steel weld typical (narrow gap) from EPR and a typical VVER austenitic stainless steel dissimilar weld (DMW).
Several European organizations are involved in the experimental work: EDF, CEA, Framatome, ARMINES, KIWA, Framatome GmbH, VTT, BZN, MTA-EK, and CIEMAT.