Development of a thermo-mechanical behaviour model adapted to the ITER vacuum vessel material

Abstract The ITER machine has been classified as a Basic Nuclear Installation French nuclear regulator (INB n°174), which implies that it will be the first fusion reactor to go through complete French nuclear licencing. The combination of mechanic and electromagnetic phenomena with the heat loads caused by neutron streaming requires a multi-physics approach to the damage assessment, which has not yet been implemented in the common nuclear codes and standards. The general damage prevention methodology consists in guaranteeing the structural integrity of a component. The development of design rules has mainly two origins: prevention of damage from monotonic mechanical loads and prevention of damage from repeated application of loads. In most cases, structural integrity is justified within a linear elastic behaviour but when this route is not enough to respect the design criteria, several non-linear approaches to the material's mechanical behaviour can be considered, requiring more elaborated demonstration of the design compliance. Nevertheless, the models proposed in the nuclear model database are sometimes not sufficient to properly describe the experimentally observed cyclic plasticity behaviour and, in particular, the ratcheting and shakedown phenomena. According to ITER community experts in materials and analyses, a thermo-mechanical behaviour model fitting the ITER Tokamak materials data will guarantee the best prediction of the damage considering a nuclear and a multi-physic loading condition. This paper describes the assessment of the non-linear behaviour of Vacuum Vessel (VV) material with a strong thermo-mechanical coupling and a damage parameter to prevent crack initiation. More precisely, Chaboche's models available in the literature (elasto-(visco)-plasticity models, with various types of hardening) have been enriched in order to explicitly take into account the influence of the temperature on the mechanical behaviour and, reciprocally, the influence of the mechanical behaviour on the temperature. Mechanical cycling tests have been performed on the VV constitutive material, emphasizing on the progressive deformation state up to failure mode, i.e., ratcheting. The proposed models have been tested on a homogeneous problem and the results compared with uniaxial test results; this type of simulation is commonly called “0D”analysis. The last part of this document describes the finite element implementation of the constitutive material model and its application to the ITER VV welded support.