User's manual and analysis methodology of probabilistic fracture mechanics analysis code PASCAL Ver.4 for reactor pressure vessel (Contract research)

Katsuyama, Jinya  ; Masaki, Koichi; Miyamoto, Yuhei*; Li, Y. 

As a part of the structural integrity research for aging light water reactor components, a probabilistic fracture mechanics (PFM) analysis code PASCAL has been developed in JAEA. The PASCAL code can evaluate the conditional failure probabilities and failure frequencies for core region in reactor pressure vessels under the pressurized thermal shock events. In this study, we improved many functions such as the stress intensity factor solutions, the fracture toughness models, or confidence level evaluation function by considering epistemic and aleatory uncertainties related to influence parameters in the structural integrity assessment. We also developed the analysis module PASCAL-Manager which calculates the failure frequency for the entire core region taking into consideration the failure probabilities obtained from PACAL-RV. Based on these improvements, the new analysis code is upgraded to PASCAL Ver.4. This report provides the user's manual and theoretical background of PASCAL Ver.4.