A Proposal of Inelastic Constitutive Equations of Lead Alloys Used for Structural Tests Simulating Severe Accident Conditions

Abstract

This paper studies inelastic stress-strain relationship equation and creep rupture equation and creep strain equation of 99%lead-1% antimony alloy. Under the severe accident conditions, structural materials of nuclear power plants are subjected to excessive high temperature. Although it is very essential to clarify how the structure collapses under the severe accident conditions, there’re no experimental evidences of failure modes and the failure mechanisms in such high temperatures are not clarified. However, it is very difficult and expensive to perform structural tests using actual structural materials, such as austenitic stainless steels. Therefore, the authors propose to use lead alloys instead of actual structural materials. Because the strength of such alloys is much poorer than that of the actual structural materials, failure can be observed at much low temperature and by much small load. For demonstration of analogy between the failure mechanisms of lead alloy structure at low temperature and those of the actual structures at extremely elevated temperature, numerical analyses are required. The authors proposes inelastic constitutive equations of lead alloy based on a series of material tests. Nonlinear numerical analyses, e.g. finite element analyses, can be performed using the proposed equations.