Determination of Shakedown Limit Load for a 90-Degree Pipe Bend Using a Simplified Technique

In this paper a simplified technique is presented to determine the shakedown limit load of a 90-degree pipe bend subjected to constant internal pressure and cyclic in-plane closing bending moment using the finite element method. The simplified technique determines the shakedown limit load without performing time consuming full elastic-plastic cyclic loading simulations or conventional iterative elastic techniques. Instead, the shakedown limit load is determined by performing two finite element analyses namely; an elastic analysis and an elastic-plastic analysis. By extracting the results of the two analyses, the shakedown limit load is determined through the calculation of the residual stresses developed in the pipe bend. In order to gain confidence in the simplified technique, the output shakedown limit moments are used to perform full elastic-plastic cyclic loading simulations to check for shakedown behavior of the pipe bend. The shakedown limit moments output by the simplified technique are used to generate the shakedown diagram of the pipe bend for a range of constant internal pressure magnitudes. The maximum moment carrying capacity (limit moment) the pipe bend can withstand and the elastic limit are also determined and imposed on the shakedown diagram of the pipe bend. In order to get acquainted with the simplified technique, it is applied beforehand to a bench mark shakedown problem namely, the Bree cylinder (Bree, J., 1967, J. Strain Anal., 3, pp. 226–238) problem. The Bree cylinder is subjected to constant internal pressure and cyclic high heat fluxes across its wall. The results of the simplified technique showed very good correlation with the analytically determined Bree diagram of the cylinder.