Development of inelastic constitutive model for type 304 stainless steel and its application to fracture mechanics analysis

Inelastic deformation plays an important role in the structural integrity of components of liquid metal fast breeder reactors and its accurate assessment is strongly desirable for development of a reliable design procedure. A time-independent plastic constitutive model was developed for this purpose with an emphasis on temperature and temperature history-dependence of cyclic deformation behavior. This model was incorporated into a finite clement code for promoting its use in structural integrity assessment of components. A function of fracture mechanics analysis was also developed. This paper describes both the constitutive model and an example of fracture mechanics analysis. Methods for numerically estimating fracture mechanics parameters were given and their effectiveness was verified by application to a simple problem