The elastic compensation method in shell-based design by analysis

A version of the elastic compensation method for lower bound limit loads is proposed for thin shell finite element analysis. Allowable static loads calculated by the method and the Code limit analysis rules are compared with corresponding loads given by conventional incremental limit analysis and elastic analysis (with stress categorization) for two sample problems; a torispherical head and a cylinder-cylinder nozzle intersection. The results show that the elastic compensation method gives comparable results to the conventional limit analysis approach, indicating that the proposed technique is suitable for limit-based design applications.