Quantification of pressure-induced hoop stress effect on fracture analysis of circumferential through-wall cracked pipes

This paper provides engineering J and crack opening displacement (COD) estimation equations for through-wall cracked (TWC) pipes under internal pressure and under combined internal pressure and bending. Based on selected 3-D FE calculations for the TWC pipe under internal pressure using power law materials, elastic and plastic influence functions for fully plastic J and COD solutions are tabulated as a function of the normalised crack length and the mean radius-to-thickness ratio. These developed GE/EPRI-type solutions are then re-formulated based on the reference stress concept. Such re-formulation not only provides simpler equations for J and COD estimation, but also can be easily extended to combined internal pressure and bending. The proposed reference stress based J and COD estimation equations are compared with elastic-plastic 3-D FE results using actual stress-strain data for Type 316 stainless steels. The FE results for both internal pressure cases and combined internal pressure and bending cases compare very well with the proposed J and COD estimates.