Abstract
Reactor pressure vessel (RPV) under severe accident conditions accompanied by core melting is exposed to direct high-temperature thermal loads. Understanding the creep behavior of the material is one of the most important factors for evaluating the structural integrity at these conditions. While damage evaluation studies have been conducted on critical structures of nuclear power plants through finite element (FE) analyses considering creep behavior, for accurate creep damage evaluation, constitutive equations considered in the FE analyses may have different results depending on the time hardening and strain hardening models as well as the tertiary creep consideration. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the creep damage under severe accident conditions by using FE method for a representative domestic RPV material, SA508 Gr.3. The effect of material hardening models and constitutive equations which are the main variables were also investigated.
