Behavior of cracked cylinders under combined thermal and mechanical loading

Nuclear pressure vessels and pipings can be submitted in their life to severe mechanical and thermal loadings. Engineering methods easy to apply, but sufficiently accurate, are needed to assess the flaws. In the field of non-linear fracture mechanics a lot of work has been achieved for structures submitted to mechanical loadings. But for thermal loadings, and particularly for thermal gradients, only few contributions are available. The authors propose, here, to present the main results of a complete set of finite element computations, conducted in France by CEA, EDF and FRAMATOME, on cracked cylinders submitted to combined mechanical and thermal loads. The interaction between these two types of loads is analyzed in the cases of austenitic and ferritic structures. Moreover, these results are compared to the predictions obtained by simplified engineering methods (R6 procedure, JSA16, and JEDF approaches). Their domain of validity is also discussed