We were pleased to have John Sanders from California State Fullerton present at the 2022 SIMULIA Santa Clara Regional User Meeting, June 22, 2022.

Abstract: Next-generation nuclear reactors are currently being designed to operate at temperatures up to 1000 degrees centigrade. At such high temperatures, metals undergo a combination of elastic and creep deformation, and the primary failure mechanism for next-generation reactor components is expected to be creep rupture. Of particular interest to structural engineers designing such components is the magnitude of the stress concentration ahead of a crack tip in creeping metals - a classical problem in continuum fracture mechanics, but one that is impossible to treat analytically for all but the simplest material models. This talk will present recent finite element simulations of the crack-tip stress fields performed using the Abaqus Unified FEA product suite. To investigate the behavior of the stress concentration during the transition from the primary creep phase to the secondary creep phase, a unified creep-plasticity model developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and calibrated to experimental data for two high-temperature superalloys, was implemented via a UMAT user-defined material subroutine. The simulations reveal not only the relevant loading parameters that characterize the crack-tip stress concentration, but also a dimensionless number quantifying the influence of primary creep on the crack-tip stress fields. These results promise to aid in the design of next-generation nuclear reactor components.

Biography: Dr Sanders is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at California State University, Fullerton. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

RUM2022 ​​​​​​​RUM2022-SantaClara Abaqus ​​​​​​​