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INCEFA-SCALE is a five-year project supported by the European Commission HORIZON2020 programme. It kicked off in September 2020 and is the successor to the INCEFA-PLUS programme. The objective is to continue work, advancing the ability to predict lifetimes of Nuclear Plant components when subjected to Environmental Assisted Fatigue (EAF) loading. The main issue addressed by INCEFA-SCALE is the transferability of laboratory-scale tests to real nuclear components. The project strategy will be (1) the development of comprehensive mechanistic understanding developed through detailed examination of test specimens and data mining, and (2) testing focussed on particular aspects of component-scale cyclic loading. From these data, one of the main objectives is to derive an EAF assessment procedure that can be used by assessors for the extrapolation of laboratory test data to real component geometries and conditions, for lifetime calculations. This paper will give an overview of the INCEFA-SCALE modelling plans and some illustrations on the 5 main topics that have been identified: (1) numerical analyses to support test design and interpretation, (2) data mining, (3) review of the codified methods, (4) fatigue damage modelling and noncodified approaches to better address for fatigue damage mechanisms, and (5) industrial application. Open access abstract of PVP2023-101351

Sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) is a strategic and integrated approach to dealing with the complexity of urban transport. One of its eight principles emphasises the importance of taking the entire functional urban area into consideration when developing and implementing such a strategic plan. What must not be forgotten, however, is that a city consists of many different neighbourhoods and this planning level is of equal importance. This SUMP topic guide highlights ways in which planning efforts at the neighbourhood level and at the city-wide level can complement one another. It is based on the experience of the CIVITAS project SUNRISE and its sister projects. The document highlights the specific advantages of planning for sustainable mobility at the neighbourhood level. The neighbourhood is where people’s everyday-life unfolds and where many mobility-related choices are anchored and determined. It is also a spatial level with certain features that can and should be utilised on the way to a more sustainable mobility system. This includes short distances that are conducive to active modes of transport, but also a shared sense of identity, detailed local knowledge and established communication channels etc. Another key advantage of working at the neighbourhood-level is the opportunity to involve residents and stakeholders intensively along all steps of the innovation chain – much more than what is typically possible in city-wide (SUMP) planning processes: The identification of problems, the development of measures, their implementation and their evaluation. The starting point of this Topic Guide is therefore the nexus between “co-creation” as a procedural approach and the neighbourhood as a spatial / social unit. However, there is usually a lack of power at the neighbourhood level, a lack of specialist expertise, of quality data, of paid staff capacity and of influence on infrastructure decisions that affect the neighbourhood. All of this means that efforts at the neighbourhood-level should be “joined-up” with efforts at the city-wide level. It also means that if a city’s high-level mobility planning ignores the reality in its many neighbourhoods, it runs the risk of “structural arrogance” and/or ignorance and simply of limited effectiveness. In other words, if mobility does not “work” in the various neighbourhoods it is unlikely to work in the city as a whole. Therefore, neighbourhood-based and city-wide planning must be aligned. The Topic Guide highlights situations where this alignment makes most sense and how such an alignment can be achieved. If well coordinated, SUMP activities can support actions at the neighbourhood level in various ways and ensure that decentral efforts are compatible with city-wide goals and measures. Vice versa, initiatives for sustainable mobility in a neighbourhood can be the spearhead of certain measures that are supposed to be implemented in the entire city. This document corresponds to Deliverable D3.6 of the Horizon 2020 project SUNRISE. See https://civitas-sunrise.eu/resources/publications

INCEFA-SCALE is a five-year project supported by the European Commission HORIZON2020 program. It is the successor to the INCEFA-PLUS project that ran from 2015 to 2020. Both projects try to address existing gaps between the fatigue behavior of stainless steels in the laboratory, real fatigue behavior observed in nuclear components during operating service, and provide guidance on how to account for the studied behavior in fatigue assessments. These programmes are contributing to a database with a large number of parameters (strain amplitude, strain rate, temperature, surface roughness, hold time periods, chemistry, etc.). Once the International Fatigue Database Agreement is signed, this database will be augmented with fatigue data shared by international organisations from the US, Korea, Japan and Europe. This will enable INCEFA-SCALE to investigate one of the largest fatigue databases in the world. However, a database compiled from a range of sources with differing objectives creates an issue for analyists as the data will not necessarily be balanced. The impact that this issue may have on an analysis can be mititgated through good data screening and selection practice that must be informed by data visualization. One of the objectives of the INCEFA-SCALE data mining workpackage is to develop and provide a set of tools to aid in this mitigation as well as enabling the statistical analysis of the broader dataset. During the INCEFA-SCALE project, a data mining tool was developed to statistically analyze all data available to date . In this paper, these tools are presented and, as a proof of concept, used to analyse the available using similar concepts to that of INCEFA-PLUS. To aid in the evaluation of the database and tools expressions for predicting fatigue life of stainless steel specimens in air and ligh water reactor primary coolant conditions are provided. A key requirement of these data exploration and analysis tools is that they are generally accessible and available to the INCEFA-SCALE community to support collaborative data analysis.. The conclusions and findings extracted from this data mining analysis are shown and compared with the current procedures most used in environmental fatigue analyses of nuclear components and systems. Open access abstract of PVP2023-106618

In early 2020, the EOSC Community took another crucial step on the road to the development and implementation of the European Open Science Cloud, as seven key EOSC-related Horizon 2020 projects signed a Collaboration Agreement in support of the EOSC Governance. The Agreement involves all the projects supported within the INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019 call. The Agreement provides a useful framework for all parties to collaborate on a wide range of topics, in order to enhance synergies in all mutual activities related to the EOSC. The projects also agreed on a Joint Activity Plan, which will guide them towards the first iteration of EOSC. Overlaps and complementarities among projects were identified, as well as specific areas for potential cooperation, ultimately aimed at the development of a common strategy to synchronise activities with the EOSC Working Groups. Between April and May 2020, EOSCsecretariat.eu collected the position papers on EOSC compiled by the INFRAEOSC 5b projects, the subgroup that specifically includes the four regional projects covering all corners of Europe, as well as the thematic project ExPaNDS. We would like to thank the five Horizon 2020 projects which have contributed to the making of this compilation of EOSC position papers: EOSC-Nordic (GA No. 857652), EOSC-Pillar (GA No. 857650), EOSC-synergy (GA No. 857647), ExPaNDS (GA No. 857641), and NI4OS-Europe (GA No. 857645). EOSC-Nordic (GA No. 857652), EOSC-Pillar (GA No. 857650), EOSC-synergy (GA No. 857647), ExPaNDS (GA No. 857641), and NI4OS-Europe (GA No. 857645).

INCEFA-SCALE is a five year project supported by the European Commission HORIZON2020 programme. It is the successor to the INCEFA-PLUS programme that ran from 2015 to 2020. INCEFA-SCALE kicked off in October 2020. The objective is to continue work, advancing the ability to predict lifetimes of Nuclear Plant components when subjected to Environmental Assisted Fatigue loading. It has been generally observed by nuclear plant operators that the number of failure events attributable to EAF is fewer than predicted by the current assessment methodologies. It is internationally recognised that a possible contributor to this discrepancy is the transferability of laboratory-scale tests to real nuclear components. EPRI, in the USA, is leading a series of component-scale environmental fatigue tests that are expected to advance data availability significantly; however, the ability to address transferability of laboratory-scale tests to real component geometries and loadings will still be constrained by limited test data. This is the knowledge gap addressed by INCEFA-SCALE. The project strategy will be (1) the development of comprehensive mechanistic understanding developed through detailed examination of test specimens and MatDB data mining, and (2) testing focussed on particular aspects of component-scale cyclic loading. The project will initially survey and understand the vast amount of test data within JRC���s MatDB database (from the predecessor INCEFAPLUS project, and from other external sources such as USNRC, EPRI, MHI and the AdFaM project). The experimental programmewill be specified in the first year and run for three years. Finally, the project will deliver guidance on the use of laboratory-scale data for component-scale applications. This paper will report progress in agreeing data gaps, mechanistic understanding needs, and testing requirements. Open access abstract of PVP2021-61793.

INCEFA-SCALE is a five-year project supported by the European Commission HORIZON 2020 programme. It is the successor to the INCEFA-PLUS programme that ran from 2015 to 2020. INCEFA-SCALE kicked off in September 2020. The objective is to advance the ability to predict lifetimes of Nuclear Plant components when subjected to Environmental Assisted Fatigue (EAF) loading. It has been generally observed by nuclear plant operators that there appears to be a disconnect between the perceived difficulty of providing an acceptable assessment result with the current EAF methodologies and the good service experience with regard to this specific degradation mechanism. It is internationally recognised that a possible contributor to this discrepancy is the transferability of laboratory-scale tests to real nuclear components. This is the key knowledge gap addressed by INCEFA-SCALE. To address this gap, the project has identified specific loading, geometric and environmental conditions which are not fully understood and may be considered excessively pessimistically in assessment. The conditions include variable amplitude and multiaxial loading, stress raising features such as notches, and the transferability of results between air and PWR environments, and between specimens with differing surface finishes, under the complex loading scenarios under consideration. Test matrices have been designed to deepen the understanding of specific materials’ (stainless steels) fatigue performance under these conditions, and the testing is well underway at the time of writing. This paper will give an overview of the INCEFA-SCALE testing carried out to date, from the first two one-year phases of the testing programme. The testing and associated analysis has been designed to better understand the material behaviour at the component scale, and assess the applicability of models, developed elsewhere in the project, to predict the lives of these components, which are in turn informed by comprehensive characterisation of the material after failure. The test results are presented in a manner to allow comparison between the experimental fatigue lives and those predicted with standardised assessment procedures, such as NUREG/CR-6909, with comment on how more advanced models (addressed in a different paper), could be used to improve predictions. Open access abstract of PVP2023-106243

A pressurized water reactor (PWR) primary environment can have a deleterious effect on the fatigue lifetime of austenitic stainless steels. One of the main goals of a five-year INCEFA-SCALE (INcreasing safety in NPPs by Covering gaps in Environmental Fatigue Assessment - focusing on gaps between laboratory data and component SCALE) project, kicked off in October 2020 and supported by the European Commission HORIZON2020 programme, is to develop an improved mechanistic understanding behind the effect of a PWR primary environment on the fatigue behavior of austenitic stainless steels through coordinated extensive characterization of as-machined and tested specimens at partner organizations. This work focuses on the microstructure characterization of as-received austenitic stainless steel 316L plate material and as-machined fatigue specimens, as well as the preparation of guidelines on post-mortem characterization for the consortium. The presented microstructure characterization is carried out using light optical microscopy (LOM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and analytical electron microscopy (AEM) (including electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), scanning/transmission electron microscopy (STEM/TEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and electron diffraction). The hardness, grain structure, inclusions, and delta-ferrite of the as-received 316L material were investigated. The surface roughness, machining-induced deformation layers, and ultra-fine-grained structure of as-machined ground and polished specimens were studied. A ground surface finish leads to significantly higher machining-induced deformation, and surface roughness, with plenty of machining-induced cracks and defects extending a few microns into the bulk material, compared to a polished finish. The guidelines on the post-mortem characterization for the whole consortium can guide partner organizations in their post-test analysis for a direct comparison of the characterization data, which facilitates the mechanism interpretation. Open access abstract of PVP2023-105888