Hill Engineering is presenting about residual stress in welding as part of the EPRI International Light Water Reactor Materials Reliability Conference and Exhibition. The objective of the conference is to gather the leading domestic and international nuclear engineers, materials scientists, and vendors in a forum for discussing and reporting the latest research regarding the reliability of materials in Light Water Reactor Vessels and their components. Hill Engineering’s presentation will include a summary of recent work on residual stress measurement for an excavate and weld repair mockup. The abstract text is presented below.
This presentation describes a sequence of residual stress measurements made to determine a two-dimensional map of biaxial welding residual stress (weld direction and transverse to the weld direction) in a mock-up with a partial arc excavate and weld repair. The mock-up joins two dissimilar metal plates (SA508 and SS316) using a butt weld made of dissimilar filler metal (A82/182). A partial slot was then excavated and filled in with M52 weld metal. The mockup was fabricated to investigate the effectiveness of overlays to address stress corrosion cracking problems in reactor coolant system butt welds. The biaxial mapping experiments include contour method measurements of the weld-direction residual stress at select locations (beginning, end, and middle of the repair) followed by slice extraction and slitting measurements of the residual stress transverse to the weld direction. The measured residual stresses follow expected trends, and compare favorably to the results of weld residual stress simulations.
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