Limit and Shakedown Analysis of 45-Degree Piping Elbows Under Internal Pressure and In-Plane Bending

Abstract

This paper carries out the limit and shakedown analysis of 45 deg piping elbows made up of elastic–perfectly plastic materials by means of the recently proposed stress compensation method (SCM). The elbows are subjected to steady internal pressure and cyclic in-plane closing, opening, and reversed bending moments. Different geometries of the piping elbows and various combinations of these applied loads are investigated to generate various plastic limit and shakedown limit load interaction curves. The plastic limit bending moment and plastic limit internal pressure calculated with the SCM are compared to those determined by the twice-elastic-slope approach. Full step-by-step (SBS) elastic–plastic incremental finite element analysis (FEA) is utilized to verify the structural cyclic responses on both sides of the curves obtained and further to confirm the correct shakedown limit loads and boundaries. It is shown that the SCM calculates the shakedown limit load accurately and possesses about 40 times the computation efficiency of the SBS elastic–plastic incremental method. The effects of the ratios of mean radius to wall thickness and bending radius to mean radius of the piping elbow as well as the loading conditions on the plastic limit and shakedown limit load interaction curves are presented. The results presented in this work give a comprehensive understanding of long-term response behaviors of the piping elbow subjected to cyclic loadings and provide some guidance for the design and integrity assessment of piping systems.