The complex experimental equipment has been developed and manufactured in compliance with the existing standards for measuring hardness and strength characteristics via the method of instrumented indentation, as well as for short-term static uniaxial tensile tests of structural materials and small punch testing of miniature disk specimens in the macrorange of loads of 2-10,000 N. This allows one to obtain the necessary characteristics of hardness and strength in relation to the current state of materials of the main equipment at NPP and thereby minimize the volume of material used for the production of specimens on the same setup employing various normative techniques of both destructive and non-destructive inspections. The equipment is designed in the form of replaceable units: indentation, tension, and punching of miniature disk specimens, which are installed depending on the test method. As a result, there is a unified assembly that makes it possible to reduce the effect of instrument errors in the validity of the data obtained using different test methods and facilitate its modification according to the other tests. The developed experimental equipment has been tested using the segment of metal of the double ball pipe wall empty set 990 x 70 mm (the basic metal is 10GN2MFA steel and the deposited material is 08Kh19N10G2B steel) of the Du850 main circulation pipeline of NPP from WWER-1000 reactor pressure vessel. The mechanical characteristics obtained by the methods of indirect control were compared with those obtained from standard tensile tests. At the same time, the deviation of the values of yield strength and ultimate strength obtained employing the indirect control methods from the values obtained in the standard tensile testing is within the limits recommended by the normative documents.
