Investigation of Temperature Effect on Cracked Pressurized Pipes

Abstract

Pipes carrying heated-pressurized fluid have numerous manufacturing defects that resulted from thermal loadings. Therefore, study the thermal loading effect on the cracked pipes is important to decrease the risks of pipe fracture during their operation. In this work, the effect of the thermal stress distribution on the cracked pipes has been studied numerically. The “mode I” type of crack has been considered for the study. The results have been validated with an available analytical solution for a pristine cylinder. The temperature and stress distribution for different crack length ratio has been studied. The influence of surface’s temperature and fluid’s temperature on radial stress, tangential stresses are discussed. The J-integral and stress intensity factor in analyzed for various thermal conditions. In addition, the radial and tangential stress variations of the various pressurized fluids which have various temperature have been investigated. The stress intensity factor and the J-integrals were calculated for different crack length ratios. In addition, the effect of surface temperature has been studied. It was found that the surface and fluid’s temperature affects the stress distributions and J-integral values. The results show that the J-integral and the stress intensity factor increases as the surface temperature of the pipe increases while their values decrease with increase the surface temperature.