Additive manufacturing processes such as selective laser melting are rapidly gaining a foothold in safety-relevant areas of application such as powerplants or nuclear facilities. Special requirements apply to these applications. A certain material behavior must be guaranteed and the material must be approved for these applications. One of the biggest challenges here is the transfer of these already approved materials from conventional manufacturing processes to additive manufacturing. Ferritic steels that have been processed conventionally by forging, welding, casting, and bending are widely used in safety-relevant applications such as reactor pressure vessels, steam generators, valves, and piping. However, the use of ferritic steels for AM has been relatively little explored. In search of new materials for the SLM process, it is assumed that materials with good weldability are also additively processible. Therefore, the processability with SLM, the process behavior, and the achievable material properties of the weldable ferritic material 22NiMoCr3-7, which is currently used in nuclear facilities, are investigated. The material properties achieved in the SLM are compared with the conventionally forged material as it is used in state-of-the-art pressure water reactors. This study shows that the ferritic-bainitic steel 22NiMoCr3-7 is suitable for processing with SLM. Suitable process parameters were found with which density values > 99% were achieved. For the comparison of the two materials in this study, the microstructure, hardness values, and tensile strength were compared. By means of a specially adapted heat treatment method, the material properties of the printed material could be approximated to those of the original block material. In particular, the cooling medium/cooling method was adapted and the cooling rate reduced. The targeted ferritic-bainitic microstructure was achieved by this heat treatment. The main difference found between the two materials relates to the grain sizes present. For the forged material, the grain size distribution varies between very fine and slightly coarse grains. The grain size distribution in the printed material is more uniform and the grains are smaller overall. In general, it was difficult and only minimal possible to induce grain growth. As a result, the hardness values of the printed material are also slightly higher. The tensile strength could be approximated to that of the reference material up to 60 MPa. The approximation of the mechanical-technological properties is therefore deemed to be adequate.

Laminar and quasi-laminar orientations of hydrogen flakes with an inclination up to 16° to the pressure retaining surface were found in pressure vessels of Belgian nuclear power plants. Because of their orientation, these crack tips undergo predominantly mixed-mode loading conditions under internal pressure and the induced stress and strain fields of the single crack tips influence each other. In a former paper, the failure behavior under mixed-mode loading conditions was investigated at RT (Room Temperature) in the upper shelf and in the lower transition region of the steel 22NiMoCr3-7, respectively. In this paper, the failure behavior will be shown for many different levels of material toughness (beginning from upper shelf down to the lower shelf region) on experiments. Additionally numerical simulations are carried out with extended micromechanical based damage mechanics models. For the description of ductile failure mode the Rousselier model is used and the Beremin model to calculate the probability of cleavage fracture. To simulate the sensitivity for low stress triaxiality damage by shear loading, the damage mechanics model was enhanced with a term to account for damage evolution by shear. For numerical simulations in the transition region of brittle-to-ductile failure a coupled damage mechanics model (enhanced Rousselier & Beremin) will be used. In this paper, the current state of the ongoing research project is presented.