Fracture of Zircaloy-4 fuel cladding tubes with hydride blisters

Vincent Macdonald (1, 2) , David Le Boulch (3) , Arthur Hellouin de Menibus (4) , Jacques Besson (2) , Quentin Auzoux (1) , Jérôme Crépin (2) , Thomas Le Jolu (1)

1 SEMI - Service d'Etudes des Matériaux Irradiés
2 CDM - Centre des Matériaux
3 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)
4 SRMA - Service des Recherches Métallurgiques Appliquées

The influence of hydride blister on cold worked stress relieved Zircaloy-4 cladding tubes fracture toughness at room temperature was studied using hoop tensile tests and plane strain tensile tests. The experimental macroscopic fracture stress and strain values and an elastic-plastic finite element analysis of the mechanical tests with the CAST3 M code were used to calculate the J-integral and estimate the fracture toughness for several blister depths from 120 to 240 μm.

Mots clés: Zircaloy-4; fuel cladding; hydride blister; fracture toughness

Domaines: Matériaux

Vincent Macdonald, David Le Boulch, Arthur Hellouin de Menibus, Jacques Besson, Quentin Auzoux, et al.. Fracture of Zircaloy-4 fuel cladding tubes with hydride blisters. 20th European conference on fracture (ECF 20), Jun 2014, Trondheim, Norway. pp.233-238, ⟨10.1016/j.mspro.2014.06.041⟩. ⟨hal-01053640⟩