Use of Duplex Stainless Steel in Economic Design of a Pressure Vessel

Abstract

Pressure vessels have been used for a long time in various applications in oil, chemical, nuclear, and power industries. Although high-strength steels have been available in the last three decades, there are still some provisions in design codes that preclude a full exploitation of its properties. This was recognized by the European Equipment Industry and an initiative to improve economy and safe use of high-strength steels in the pressure vessel design was expressed in the evaluation report (, and , EPERC Report No. (97)005, Nov. 11, 1997). Duplex stainless steel (DSS) has a mixed structure which consists of ferrite and austenite stainless steels, with austenite between 40% and 60%. The current version of the European standard for unfired pressure vessels EN 13445:2002 contains an innovative design procedure based on Finite Element Analysis (FEA), called Design by Analysis-Direct Route (DBA-DR). According to EN 13445:2002 duplex stainless steels should be designed as a ferritic stainless steels. Such statement seems to penalize the DSS grades for the use in unfired pressure vessels (, and , 2001, EPERC Bulletin, No. 5). The aim of this paper is to present an investigation performed by Luleå University of Technology within the ECOPRESS project (2000-2003) (http://www.ecopress.org), indicating possibilities towards economic design of pressure vessels made of the EN 1.4462, designation according to the European standard EN 10088-1 Stainless steels. The results show that FEA with von Mises yield criterion and isotropic hardening describe the material behaviour with a good agreement compared to tests and that 5% principal strain limit is too low and 12% is more appropriate.