Proposal of the Screening Method for Prevention of the Accumulation of the Ratcheting Strain Derived From the Movement of the Temperature Distribution

The prevention of excessive deformation by thermal ratcheting is important in the design of high-temperature components of fast breeder reactors (FBR). This includes evaluation methods for a new type of thermal ratcheting caused by a traveling temperature distribution. Igari et al. [1] proposed a mechanism-based evaluation method to evaluate thermal ratcheting caused by temperature distributions traveling long and short distances. In this paper, we simplify the existing method and propose a screening method to prevent thermal ratcheting strain in the design of practical components. The proposed method consists of two steps to prevent the continuous accumulation of ratcheting strain. The first step is to determine whether all points through the wall thickness are in the plastic state. This is based on an equivalent stress, which comprises the primary stress, the thermal membrane stress, and the thermal bending stress. When the equivalent stress is less than the yield strength of the cylinder material, overall plastic deformation through the wall thickness does not occur. When the equivalent stress exceeds the yield strength in some regions of the cylinder, the ranges of these regions are measured for the second step. To prevent the acceleration of the plastic deformation due to creep, we define the upper limit of the equivalent stress based on the relaxation strength, Sr. The second step is to determine whether the accumulation of the plastic strain saturates (i.e. if shakedown occurs). For this purpose, we define the screening criteria for the range of the plastic region. When the range of the plastic region is sufficiently small, residual stress is generated in the direction opposite to the plastic deformation direction. As a result of residual stress, further accumulation of the plastic deformation is suppressed, and finally shakedown occurs. If the range of the plastic region exceeds the defined criteria, a more detailed evaluation method (e.g. inelastic finite element analysis) may be used for the component design. To validate the proposed method, we performed a set of elasto-plastic finite element method (FEM) analyses, with the assumption of elastic perfectly plastic material.