from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
FRACTESUS (Fracture mechanics testing of irradiated RPV steels by means of sub-sized specimens) is a project supported by the European Commission HORIZON2020 programme. The project started in October of 2020 and will be finished in September of 2024. Twenty-two organizations from across Europe (15), Switzerland (1), United Kingdom (3), Japan (1), United State (1) and Canada (1) are participating in this project. The goal of this project is to join European and International effort to establish the foundation of small specimen fracture toughness validation and demonstration to achieve change in code and standards allowing address the various national regulatory authority concerns.One of the important tasks of this project is the experimental and numerical simulation of the fracture mechanical behavior of the sub-sized specimens. The numerical simulation of the J-integral, of the loss of constraint assessment and finally the evaluation of the size effect is being performed. These numerical simulations will help to rationalize the experimental data.This paper presents the influence of simulated loading conditions and finite element mesh on J-integral. Two options were investigated of the load transfer to the specimen: by a pin with a zero friction and by added material chunk with the triangular tip. The evaluation of the size effect to the fracture behavior was presented also. For this purpose, the Finite Element (FE) code ANSYS was used.The paper is for the dissemination of the project results.
Keywords: finite element method, fracture mechanic, J-integral, modelling of pin, size of specimen© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.