Failure Behavior of Elbows With Local Wall Thinning Under Cyclic Load

Pressurized piping systems used in nuclear power plants are supposed to be degraded by the effects of aging. Local wall thinning is one of the defects considered to be caused in piping systems due to the effects of aging, but the failure behavior of thinned wall pipes under seismic load is still not clear. Therefore an experimental and analytical study to clarify the failure behavior of thinned wall pipes is being conducted. In this paper, the experimental results of locally thinned wall elbows under cyclic bending load are described. Displacement-controlled cyclic bending tests were conducted on elbows with local wall thinning. The test models were pressurized to 10MPa with room temperature water and were subjected to in-plane or/and out-of-plane cyclic bending load until their failures. From the tests, the failure modes of the thinned wall elbows were found to be fatigue failure at the flank of the elbow, or fatigue and buckling failure accompanied with ratchet deformation. It was also found that the life of the thinned wall elbow subjected to out-of-plane bending were extremely lower than that of the elbow without wall thinning. The failure modes and fatigue lives of elbows seemed to be affected by a ratchet phenomenon.