EDF wants to complete the assessment of reactor pressure vessels usually based on crack initiation concept by crack arrest concept. The work aims at improving the knowledge of cleavage crack arrest in reactor pressure vessel steel. For that purpose, isothermal crack arrest experiments were performed for temperatures ranging from –150°C up to –50°C on compact tensile specimens and on pre-cracked rings submitted to compressive loading. Fractographic observations revealed that the whole crack propagation and arrest occurs by cleavage even if ductile tearing occurs before initiation of the unstable crack propagation. A local cleavage crack arrest criterion is applied in finite element computations carried out in elastoviscoplasticity and in full dynamics: the crack propagates since the largest principal stress reaches a critical stress. The application of this criterion on the experiments leads to a good prediction of the crack speed and of the crack length and shows that the critical stress increases with the temperature in relation with dissipation features observed on the fracture surfaces. Dependence to the geometry is observed; it can be due to the assumption used for the 2D computations. The study of the structural dynamic shows that the crack arrest phenomenon is very linked to the global dynamics of the structure: crack arrest and crack closure occur approximately at the same time.
