Determination of Full Range Stress-Strain Behavior of Pipeline Steels Using Tensile Characteristics

It is standard practice to approximate the post-yield behavior of pipeline steels by means of the Ramberg-Osgood equation. However, the Ramberg-Osgood equation is often unable to accurately describe the stress-strain behavior of contemporary pipeline steels with a high Y/T ratio. This is due to the occurrence of two distinct, independent stages of strain hardening. To address this problem, the authors recently developed a new ‘UGent’ stress-strain model which provides a better description of those steels. This paper elaborates a methodology to estimate suited parameter values for the UGent model, starting from a set of tensile characteristics. Using the proposed methodology, good approximations have been obtained for a preliminary series of eight investigated stress-strain curves. Next to all common tensile characteristics, the 1% proof stress is needed. The authors therefore encourage the future acquisition of this stress level during tensile tests. Currently, the authors perform a further in-depth validation which will be reported in the near future.