Strain based plastic instability acceptance criteria for ferritic steel safety class 1 nuclear components under level d service loads

This paper proposes strain-based acceptance criteria for assessing plastic instability of the safety class 1 nuclear components made of ferritic steel during level D service loads. The strain-based criteria were proposed with two approaches: (1) a section average approach and (2) a critical location approach. Both approaches were based on the damage initiation point corresponding to the maximum load-carrying capability point instead of the fracture point via tensile tests and finite element analysis (FEA) for the notched specimen under uni-axial tensile loading.