Application of Stress-Modified Fracture Strain Model to Full-Scale Pipes With a Circumferential Crack in the Center of Welds

A lot of welded joints are required to connect the junctions of components in the complex piping system. The structural integrity assessment on welded pipes is especially important, because the weldments are susceptible to material discontinuities, flaws and residual stresses. Finite element (FE) damage analysis can be useful and effective method for an accurate assessment on extensive structures. For the case of welded joint, the numerical method is necessarily required to assess complex features because of material discontinuities and flaws. This study provides a simple numerical method to simulate ductile tearing in welded full-scale pipes. Stress-modified fracture strain model is applied to finite element analysis with a stress reduction technique. An element-size-dependent critical damage model is also implemented in the full-scale pipe simulations. From the results of simulation, deformation response and characteristic loads are compared with experimentally measured values to verify the application of damage model on weld material. As a result, the predictions of finite element damage analysis are in good agreement with experiments.