Ring Tensile Test (RTT) is mainly performed for comparing tensile strength and total strain between nuclear fuel cladding specimens under various initial conditions. Through RTT, the loaddisplacement (F-D) curve obtained from the uniaxial tensile test can also be obtained. However, the Young’s modulus estimated from the gradient of the straight portion is much lower than general value of materials. The reasons include tensile machine compliance, slack in the fixtures, or elastic deformation of the fixtures and the tooling. Another reason is that the bending of the test part in the ring is stretched with two pieces of tools. Although the absolute value of the Young’s modulus is smaller than the actual value, it is applicable to calculate the ratio of the Young’s moduli of different materials, that is, the relative value. The Young’s modulus, or slope of the linear section, varies slightly depending on which location data is used and how much data is included. In order to obtain a more accurate ratio of Young’s moduli between materials using the RTT results, a post-processing method for the ring tensile test results that can prevent such human errors is proposed as follows. First, the slope of the linear section is obtained using the displacement and load when the load increase is the largest and the displacement and load of the position that is 95% of the maximum load increase. To replace the section where the ring-shaped specimen is stretched at the beginning of the F-D curve, a straight line equal to the slope of the linear section is drawn to the displacement axis from the position of maximum load increase and moved to the origin to obtain the final F-D curve for a RTT. Lastly, the yield stress uses the stress at the point where the 0.2% offset straight line and the F-D curve meet as suggested in the ASTM E8/E8M-11 “Standard test methods for tensile testing of metallic materials”. RTT results post-processing method was coded using FORTRAN language so that it could be performed automatically. In addition, sensitivity analysis of the included data range on the Young’s modulus was performed by using the included data range as 90%, 85%, and 80% of the maximum load increase.

• JaeYong Kim(Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI)) Corresponding author
• YongSik Yang(Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI))
• JuYeop Park(Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS))