Determination of stress intensity factors for semielliptical surface cracks in the WWER-1000 reactor pressure vessel from the results of solving thermoelasticity boundary value problems based on the mixed mesh-projection scheme of the finite element method

Abstract

Results of numerical analysis of stress intensity factors KI for semielliptical surface cracks in the WWER-1000 reactor pressure vessel by emergency cooling simulation with known engineering procedures, the equivalent spatial integration and direct methods are presented. Engineering procedures employ the results of numerical solution of axially symmetric boundary value problems of thermoelasticity based on the mixed mesh-projection scheme of the finite element method implemented in the RELAX software. The three-dimensional KI computations were performed with the SPACE software.