Charpy specimen reconstitution as a means of providing data for plex licencing purposes

In order to extract more information from surveillance programmes, the technique of Charpy specimen reconstitution has been implemented at the SCK/CEN Laboratories. Initially, a qualification was obtained for the reconstitution of new specimens from half broken ones of unirradiated plate and weld metal and of irradiated plate metal. This technique, thus starting from pieces of about 10 mm × 10 mm × 22 mm, was successfully applied to the reconstitution of weld specimens from aged weld and from the weld part of aged heat affected zone specimens. It will be further used to reconstitute irradiated weld samples and to make Cv specimens from the heads of irradiated weld tensile specimens. By changing the welding parameters it has been found possible to reduce the weld affected zone significantly. This result is applied in an attempt to reconstitute specimens from 10 mm × 10 mm × 10 mm pieces. One important application is, e.g. to obtain T-L oriented specimens from originally L-T oriented Charpy samples.