Fracture behaviour of zirconium alloy cylindrical tube with pellets under axial impact loading

A zirconium alloy cylindrical tube exhibited fracture under high-velocity axial impact load when high yield strength pellets were inserted as reported by Morishige et al., 2016. The fracture occurred after a crack was initiated at the tensile side of the bending tube. In this paper, FE analyses were conducted to clarify the fracture mechanism as well as the deformation behavior. At first, axial tensile tests using tubes with four slit-holes located at the center were performed in order to evaluate the fracture behavior of the tube. Then, digital image correlation (DIC) method was utilized to measure the local strain near the slit-holes. The results showed that the fracture displacement became smaller with smaller slit-holes' radius. Also, the strain was concentrated at the slit-holes' tips where cracks were generated before fracture. Subsequently, FE analyses of the tensile tests were conducted by LS-DYNA using the implicit method to obtain the fracture criterion. The load-displacement curve agreed well with the experiment. Then, the relationship between stress triaxiality and equivalent plastic strain near the slit-holes' area were evaluated to define the fracture criterion. Finally, FE analyses of the axial impact tests using the dynamic explicit method were conducted to compare with the fracture criterion defined by the axial tensile tests. The results indicated that a localized stress and strain might occur at the tube boundary adjacent to pellets. This was caused by the interaction between tube and pellets' edge which generated a tensile stress condition at the tube boundary when high yield strength pellet was applied. Under this condition, both stress triaxiality and effective plastic strain could increase and eventually lead to the fracture criterion. (author)