The dissertation is dedicated to the development of numerical and analytical methods for calculating the stress intensity factor (SIF) for nonclassical problems of fracture mechanics, in particular, for cracks of complex shape and for cracks in thin structures with taking into account geometric nonlinearity (GN) and their applications in various industries, in particular, for nuclear power plants, for calculation of the elements of the reactor unit.
A modification of Williams's method is presented, which describes the stress state in the crack tip. For modification of the classical approach in the considered method the additional members were presented, which are infinite in the crack tip, but attenuate at infinity. The main idea of the method is to divide the whole area of the body into two separate parts – internal one, which embraces the tip of the crack, and the external one. In the inner area, only the classic Williams functions are used, and in the outer area both the classical members and additional ones are used. At the boundary between the selected subdomains, the conjugation conditions are to be fulfilled, the essence of which is to equalize here the stresses and displacements. The very high efficiency of this method is shown for bodies that have the shape of a circle, or are infinite, where almost exact values.
A thin-walled pipe with a long surface crack is considered. The pipe, surface of which may contain the initial deviation form ideal circle, is loaded by inner pressure. In first time the problem of determining the SIF was considered in a geometrically nonlinear formulation, when changes in the geometry of the body in the process of deformation are accounted for linear material behavior. Based on the Chen-Finnie method, which considers the crack as concentrated compliance, and on original solution for geometrically nonlinear behavior of curved initially distorted beam, the compact analytical formulas are obtained, which gives the value of SIF for each value of inner pressure. It was shown that even for perfectly circular pipes having the cracks with depth up to half of the thickness of pipe walls, loaded by moderate level of inner pressure, the geometrical nonlinear values of SIF can be 10-15% less than those at linear approach application.
Another geometrically nonlinear problem is numerically investigated by known commercial FEM software for the through crack, which is loaded by a significant value of additional longitudinal force (the main factor of geometric nonlinearity considered) and small value of internal pressure (linear consideration). This statement distinguished this task from research conducted at NASA (USA), where the pressure and axial force were proportional as to pipe with closed ends. These results are of great theoretical and practical importance. In particular, it is shown that for real pipes the neglecting by influence of axial force in usual approach may lead to 4-6% error of SIF determination.
The necessity of analysis of flat cracks of non-canonical shape in three-dimensional bodies is noted. This is due to the fact that almost all existing solutions in the literature and reference results in normative documents are given for cracks that have shape of an ellipse or its part. However, real cracks detected by non-destructive testing are irregularly shaped cracks. Therefore, it is necessary to create the analytical methods that would allow to assess the impact of the crack shape, and to verify them with careful numerical procedures by FEM.
For this purpose, flat internal cracks in infinite 3D body are considered. The formulation of problems for them is reduced to well-known integro-differential equation of the theory of elasticity. As for the functions of the form, three variants of their choice were investigated - a) classical, which depends on the squares of ratio of radial coordinate of the considered point, and the corresponding coordinate of contour point; b) multiplicative, based on the product of equations describing the straight sections of the crack contour, and c) the original Oore-Burns function, which is an integral of the crack contour from the inverse square of the distance of the considered point to each point of the contour.
Practical calculations of SIF dependance with time for NPP reactor ant its elements for different scenarios of emergency situations are carried out. A number of simulation models with a built-in crack have been created, for which SIF calculations were performed by nonlinear FEM analysis. For cracks going through the cladding, where stress jumps occur, the method of influence functions is elaborated, and analytical-numerical procedure used piece-wise continuous basic laws of loading. Practical calculations were performed for the nozzle of reactor vessel, the cylindrical part of vessel, the core barrel and core baffle. These calculations were used to justify the extension of the service life of several units of Ukrainian NPPs.
