Use of Small Specimens for Evaluation of Irradiated Materials

Small specimens are playing the key role in evaluating properties of irradiated materials. The use of small specimens provides several advantages. Typically, only small volume of material can be irradiated in a reactor at desirable conditions in terms of temperature, neutron flux, and neutron dose. Small volume of irradiated material may also allow for easier handling of specimens. Smaller specimens reduce the amount of radioactive material, minimizing personnel exposures and waste disposal. However, use of small specimens imposes variety of challenges as well. These challenges are associated with proper accounting for size effects and transferability of small specimen data to the real structures of interest. The PCVN specimen as well as any fracture toughness specimen that can be made out of the broken halves of standard Charpy specimens may have exceptional utility for evaluation of RPVs. The Charpy V-notch specimen is the most commonly used specimen geometry in surveillance programs. Precracking and testing of Charpy surveillance specimens would allow one to determine and monitor directly actual fracture toughness instead of requiring indirect predictions using correlations established with impact data. However, there is a growing number of indications that there might be a bias in the reference fracture toughness transition temperature, To values derived from PCVN and compact specimens. The present paper summarizes data from the series of experiments that use subsize specimens for evaluation of the transition fracture toughness of reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels. Two types of compact specimens and three types of three-point bend specimens from five RPV materials were used in these subsize experiments. The current results showed that To determined from PCVN specimens with width (W) to thickness (B) ratio W/B = 1, on average, are lower than To determined from compact specimens with W/B = 2. At the same time, three-point bend specimens with W/B = 2 exhibited To values that were very similar to To values derived from compact specimens. Constraint corrections developed by Dodds et al. are applied to assess the bias.