Validation of BS 7910 fracture assessment procedures; wide plates and cylinders

BS 7910 provides guidance on the fitness for service of a flawed component. It covers a wide variety of metals in broad applications, thus the integrity of many components in various safety critical industries depends on it. Its detailed and rigorous validation, therefore, is of utmost importance. In this study, validation of the fracture assessment procedures of BS 7910 is carried out through the use of historical large test data, where the failure conditions are known in detail. Hundreds of test results from large-scale wide plate and cylinder tests are collected from the literature and assessed with BS 7910. The outline of the analysis and the tests analysed are given in this study in a concise manner. The exercise validates the fracture clauses and associated annexes that concern plate, pipe and curved shell geometries, together with other equations included in the procedure and used during the analyses.