Development of Failure Pressure Evaluation Model for Local Wall-Thinned Elbows Based on Finite Element Analysis

This paper provides a failure pressure evaluation model for local wall-thinned elbows. In this study, parametric finite element analyses are performed on the elbows containing local wall-thinning defect at their intrados and extrados, and the failure pressures are obtained from the analysis results by applying a local failure criterion that was validated by real-scale pipe tests. An evaluation model including the effects of thinning depth, length, circumferential angle, thinning location, and elbow geometries on the failure pressure is derived based on the evaluated failure pressures. The proposed model agrees well with the results of finite element analyses and reasonably estimates the dependence of failure pressure on the wall-thinning dimensions and elbow geometries. Also, the comparison with experimental data demonstrates that the proposed evaluation model can accurately predict the failure pressure of local wall-thinned elbows.