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ARTICLE
A New Damage Mechanics Based Approach for Integrity Assessment of Plant Components
M. K. Samal1
1 Reactor Safety Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai. E-mail: mksamal@barc.gov.in. Current address: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. E-mail: samal.3@osu.edu, Tel: +1-614-6883288
Structural Longevity 2010, 3(2), 127-153. https://doi.org/10.3970/sl.2010.003.127
Abstract
Safety analysis of critical components and the overall plant is a major
and important task in the field of mechanical engineering. Therefore, it is essential
to know the allowable loads and the corresponding failure behaviour (e.g., crack
initiation, growth and instability) of the component. The damage mechanics approaches which incorporate the microscopic processes of ductile fracture (i.e., void
nucleation, growth and coalescence) into the material constitutive behaviour has
been very successful in predicting the ductile crack propagation in specimens and
components irrespective of their geometry, loading types etc. The major drawback
of these models is the requirement of a pre-defined size of discretization for the
numerical treatment. Hence, these models are not capable of simulation of fracture
behaviour in several situations such as miniature specimens, thin films, ductileto-brittle transition regime (where the stable crack growth is of the order of few
microns before cleavage initiation), bi-material interface (requirement of different
discretization sizes across the interface), zones with steep stress gradients etc. In
this work, a new damage mechanics approach based on a nonlocal regularization
scheme has been developed and its advantages in tackling the above-mentioned
problems has been demonstrated through various examples.
Keywords
Cite This Article
Samal, M. K. (2010). A New Damage Mechanics Based Approach for Integrity Assessment of Plant Components.
Structural Longevity, 3(2), 127–153. https://doi.org/10.3970/sl.2010.003.127