APAL partners win “Best paper award”

At the ASME Pressure Vessels & Piping Conference that took place on the 17th-22nd July 2022 in Las Vegas, USA, members of the APAL team were awarded for the best scientific paper. The “Best paper award” for the scientific publication “State of the Art of WPS in RPV PTS Analysis” went to the authors Maksym Zarazovskii, Vladislav Pistora, Dana Lauerova, Florian Obermeier, Diego Mora, Yaroslav Dubyk, Tobias Bolinder, Carlos Cueto-Felgueroso, Szabolcs Szavai, Judit Dudra, Oriol Costa Garrido, Christophe Blain, Markku Puustinen, Jinya Katsuyama, B. Richard Bass, Paul T. Williams and Oleksii Shugailo.

The paper describes worldwide experiences and best practice of warm pre-stress (WPS) and its application for the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) integrity assessment. It gives a short description of existing WPS national approaches and models along with standards or rules for RPV brittle fracture assessment under pressurised thermal shock (PTS) events. Here, the applicability of WPS and its restrictions for constraint effect and crack arrest is given special attention. The second part of the paper is devoted to the identification of open issues connected to the practical WPS application in RPV integrity assessment together with the APAL partners’ views on this topic. The final part is dedicated to the analysis of experimental data for defining the WPS benefit. The conclusions presented in the paper also focus on recommendations for dealing with WPS issues, including further insights from the APAL project.

The entire APAL team would like to congratulate the main author of the paper and all colleagues who have contributed to this excellent achievement!

Diego Mora Mendez at the award ceremony