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Thermo-mechanical fatigue has an important influence on the lifetime of componentsbelonging to the primary cooling circuit of a nuclear plant. To reproduce the relevantboundary conditions including variable amplitude low cycle fatigue and ratcheting, anexperiment that mimics the cyclic thermal shock loading is performed. To correctlydescribe the mechanical behavior of stainless steel grade 316L under the prescribedconditions, a Chaboche-type constitutive model with 5 internal variable dependencies isproposed, calibrated and implemented in a commercial finite element code. A finiteelement thermal stress analysis performed on a case study using this advancedconstitutive law is presented. An evaluation of the accuracy loss introduced by reducedmaterial descriptions not accounting for temperature and strain amplitude dependency isdiscussed.