Defect assessment procedures for plants

There are a significant number of procedures available for use in plants mostly used in a company or of a national character. A number of fracture mechanics based low temperature assessment procedures have been developed during the last decade within Europe and worldwide. Guidelines and methodologies for high temperature assessment also exist within several European countries. Furthermore, new procedures are being worked on in various EC projects. The present paper gives a review and comparison of the available defect assessment procedures, presented based on mainly the available published documents by the project partners of EC TNW project PLAN, Cluster Task C2. The survey on usage of DAPs preceeds the reviews of low and high temperature procedures, followed by the unified procedures of SINTAP and HIDA, respectively. The French codified flaw evaluation procedure that was not included in the above mentioned reviews is also presented.