Contribution to the Evaluation of the Circumferentially-Cracked Round Bar for Fracture Toughness Determination of Reactor Pressure

The subject of this PhD dissertation is the use of the Circumferentially-Cracked Round Bar (CRB) for fracture toughness measurements. The main advantages of CRB are the relatively small size requirements of the testing specimens, the low cost to machine the specimen, the rotating bending fatigue allowing for easy precracking of specimens, the use of standard tensile test fixture and the axisymmetry of the specimen that avoids time consuming 3D finite element calculations. An in-depth study of the most widely used precracking technique for CRB, namely the rotating bending fatigue, is made