Experimental Study on the Deformation and Failure of the Bellows Structure Beyond the Designed Internal Pressure

Bellows structure is used to absorb the thermal expansion maintaining the boundary of the inside to outside, and it is applied to constitute the containment vessel (CV) boundary of the nuclear power plant. In this study, in order to develop the evaluation method of the ultimate strength of the bellows structure subject to internal pressure beyond the specified limit, the failure test and finite element analysis (FEA) of the bellows structure were performed. Several types of the bellows structure made of SUS304 were tested using pressurized water. The failure modes were demonstrated through the test of five and six specimens with six and five convolutions, respectively. Water leakage was caused by contact of the expanded convolution and the neighbor structure in the specimens with the shipping rod mounts. On the other hand, local failure as leakage in the deformation concentrated location and ductile failure as burst in the expanded convolution were observed in the specimen without shipping rod mounts. The maximum pressures in the test observed local and ductile failure were over ten times larger than the estimated values of the limited design pressure for in-plane instability by the EJMA standard. To simulate the buckling and deformation behavior during the test, the implicit and explicit FEA were performed. Because the inversion of the convolution accompanied by convolution contact observed in the test was too difficult a problem for implicit analysis, the maximum pressures in the step of solution converged were compared to the maximum pressures in the tests. On the other hand, explicit analysis enabled to simulate the complex deformation during the test, and the results were evaluated considering ductile failure to compare the test results.