Crack growth is generally measured during fracture experiment of specimen or component. The unloading compliance technique is commonly used for this purpose because of its simplicity. It infers the crack length from unloading compliance of cracked component. The pre‐requisite of this technique is the availability of an equation that correlates crack length with unloading compliance. While such correlations are available for compact tension and three‐point bend specimens, it is not available for big components such as pipe or pipe bend. Development of such a correlation for throughwall circumferentially cracked (TCC) straight pipe under bending, therefore, forms the objective of the present study. However, the challenge to develop such correlation for TCC pipe is that the equation should contain not only crack length as a function but also the current deformation or load level as a parameter. This is attributed to the fact that the circular cross section of the pipe ovalizes during deformation leading to change of bending stiffness of the cracked body. New compliance correlations have been proposed for TCC pipe under bending load considering these complexities. Elastic‐perfectly plastic material behaviour has been assumed to characterize the material stress–strain response. However, it has been shown that error due to this approximation with respect to the actual stress–strain behaviour is negligible if one chooses flow stress equal to average of yield and ultimate strength. The proposed correlations are expressed in terms of normalized parameters to make them independent of specific values of geometric dimensions such as radius, thickness and span length of four‐point bending loading system. Effectiveness of this normalization has also been verified by carrying out a sensitivity study.
A throughwall axial crack may develop in an elbow or pipe bend due to service related degradation mechanism. It is very important to know the plastic collapse moment (PCM) of an elbow in the presence of a throughwall axial crack. The existing PCM equations of throughwall axially cracked (TAC) elbows are either too conservative or inadequate to correctly quantify the weakening effect due to the presence of the crack. Further, they do not differentiate between closing and opening modes of bending although deformation characteristics under these two modes are completely different. Therefore, the present study has been undertaken to investigate through 3-D elastic-plastic finite element analysis. A total of 84 elbows with various sizes of axial cracks (a/Dm = 0–1), different wall thickness (R/t = 5 — 20), different elbow bend radii (Rb/R = 2,3) and two different bending modes, namely closing and opening have been considered in the analysis. Elastic-perfectly plastic stress-strain response of material has been assumed. Both geometric and material non-linearity are considered in the analysis. Crack closing is observed in most of the cases. To capture the crack closure effect, contact analysis has been performed. Plastic collapse moments have been evaluated from moment — end rotation curves by twice-elastic slope method. From these results, closed-form equations are proposed to evaluate plastic collapse moments of elbows under closing and opening mode of bending moment. The predictions of these proposed equations are compared with the test data available in the literature. Matching between predictions and experimental results is found to be satisfactory.
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