1 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Failure modes

 Strength – yielding, rupture

 Fatigue
 Creep at higher temperature
 Buckling – Stability
 Miscellaneous modes of failure.

Failure by yielding or rupture

For brittle material strict control of the stress and nature of lading is required. In places where
mechanical or thermal shock loadings are anticipated, they cannot be used as these failure occurs
unexpectedly and suddenly. This is mainly due to

1. Its low energy absorbing capability, where even a slight impact or deformation translates to high
stresses.

2. To these materials, the high stresses which is developed can only be relieved by yielding.

For ductile materials as the load increases or when the impact loading is done, the material is capable of
absorbing excess energy undergoing considerable plastic deformation and fails after going through fairly
large amount of elongation. They elongate to about 25% before failure. It also redistributes the high
concentrated stresses into a more favorable distribution due to yielding.

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2 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

DUCTILE MATERIAL

Proportional Limit - Highest stress at which stress is directly proportional to strain. It is the highest stress
at which the curve in a stress-strain diagram is a straight line. Proportional limit is equal to elastic limit for
many metals

Elastic Limit - maximum stress or force per unit area within a solid material that can arise before the onset
of permanent deformation. When stresses up to the elastic limit are removed, the material resumes its
original size and shape.

Upper yield Limit – the point at which material yields and yield stress it the lowest stress at which material
is appreciably deform with out increasing the load.

Lower yield Limit – the point from which material enters the ductile stage.

Upper and Lower yield - Upper yield point is the point after which the plastic deformation starts. This is
due to the fact that the dislocations in the crystalline structure start moving. But after a while, the
dislocations become too much in number and they restrict each other movement. This is called strain
hardening and lower yield point is the point after which strain hardening begins.

Ultimate Stress/Strength:- When lower yield point is cross out there is gradually increment in the Stress
with respect to the strain, this increment follow the parabolic curvature till failure, but failure there is a
point from where it is going down the upper most part of the gradually increment curve is the point of
ultimate Stress.

Rapture point is the strength of the material at rupture. This is also known as the breaking strength.

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3 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Modulus of resilience is the work done on a unit volume of material as the force is gradually increased
from O to A, in N·m/m3. This may be calculated as the area under the stress-strain curve from the origin
O to up to the elastic limit E (the shaded area in the figure). The resilience of the material is its ability to
absorb energy without creating a permanent distortion.

Modulus of toughness is the work done on a unit volume of material as the force is gradually increased
from O to E, in N·m/m3. This may be calculated as the area under the entire stress-strain curve (from O to
R). The toughness of a material is its ability to absorb energy without causing it to break.

Working Stress, Allowable Stress, and Factor of Safety

Working stress is defined as the actual stress of a material under a given loading. The maximum safe stress
that a material can carry is termed as the allowable stress. The allowable stress should be limited to values
not exceeding the proportional limit. However, since proportional limit is difficult to determine accurately,
the allowable tress is taken as either the yield point or ultimate strength divided by a factor of safety. The
ratio of this strength (ultimate or yield strength) to allowable strength is called the factor of safety.

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4 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

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5 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

- M.A.
6 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Fatigue failure
Fatigue is the progressive and localized structural damage that occurs when a material is subjected to
cyclic loading. Continued cycling of high stress concentrations may eventually cause a crack which
propagates and results in leakages. This failure mechanism is called fatigue. Damage once done during
the fatigue process is cumulative and normally unrecoverable.
Fatigue can be grouped in two classes; High cycle fatigue and low cycle fatigue.
High cycle fatigue involves little or no plastic action. Therefore, it is stress-governed. Normally, a fatigue
curve (also called the S–N curve) is generated for every material by experimental tests which correlates
applied stress with the number of cycles to cause failure. For high-cycle fatigue, the analysis is performed
to determine the endurance limit, which is actually a stress level that can be applied for an infinite number
of times without showing any failure. As a general rule no of cycles 10^5 is considered as demarcation
point for high and low cycle fatigue.
The loading cycles applied in piping design are normally very few in the order of a few thousands. This
type of fatigue is identified as low-cycle fatigue. For low-cycle fatigue, the applied stress normally exceeds
the yield strength of the material, which causes plastic instability in the specimen under test. But when
strain is used as the controlled variable, the results in low-cycle region are reliable as well as reproducible.
Sources of Fatigue:
For Piping system, Cyclic loadings are primarily due to:

 Thermal Expansion & Contraction

 Vibration due to Occasional loading
 Pressure variation within Piping system
 Motion wave.
 Due to Flow induced Vibration

The fatigue process is divided into three stages: crack initiation from the continued cycling of high stress
concentrations, crack propagation to critical size, and unstable rupture of the section.
Factors Affecting the Fatigue Behavior:
The factors which affect the fatigue behaviour are listed below:

 Type and Nature of Loading.

 Size of Component and stress or strain Distribution.
 Surface finish and Directional Properties.
 Stress or Strain Concentration.
 Mean stress or Strain.
 Environmental Effects.
 Metallurgical Factors and Material Properties.
 Strain Rate and Frequency Effects.

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7 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Characteristics of Low Cycle Fatigue:

 Characterized by high loads and a small no. of cycles before failure.

 Here failure occurs only with stress levels in the plastic range, i.e. significant plastic strain occurs
during each cycle.
 The stresses which cause fatigue failure in the piping are the peak stresses.
 In piping design, most of the loading cycles encountered would be of the low cycle type

Characteristics of High Cycle Fatigue:

 Characterized by high no. of cycles (Preferable N>10^4) with relatively low stress levels and the
deformation is in elastic range.
 This type of fatigue failure used in the design of rotating machinery.
 This type of fatigue results from strain cycles in the elastic range.
 A stress level, endurance limit, may be applied an infinite times without failure, is calculated.

Creep Rupture

At high temperature environments, the pipe will continue to deform under a sustained stress. The pipe
may fail after a certain period even if the stress is much lower than the ultimate strength of the material.
The phenomenon is called creep and the failure is called creep rupture. Creep occurs only at high
temperature, or — rather — is detectable only at high temperature. For this discussion, we will focus on
creep for temperatures starting from 700°F (370°C) for carbon and low alloy steels and from 800°F (430°C)
for high alloy and stainless steels.
At creep temperatures, the material has a definite life against a sustained stress. The science of creep is
finding out the relationships among stress, temperature, and the time to failure of a material with various
compositions and physical properties. Most of us do not need to know the details of all these relations.
What we need to know is the general behavior of steel at high temperatures and how to design the piping
system to avoid premature creep failure. The general behavior of creep can be explained with the typical
creep curves as shown in Fig. 1.7. The figure shows three curves representing the time-deformation
relations of three different constant loads applied at the same type of specimen under a given
temperature. As soon as the load is applied, an initial deformation is immediately generated. This is a non-
creep-related static deformation that consists of elastic or elastic plus plastic components, but is roughly
proportional to the load. As time goes by, the specimen continues to deform, leading to eventual rupture.
This time-dependent progressive deformation is the nature of creep.

Creep can be categorized into three stages. Stage 1, also called primary stage, involves the beginning
region of creep, having a deformation rate that is very high at the beginning and decreasing gradually to
the minimum level at the end. This is the only stage in which the creep rate decreases against time. The
minimum creep rate continues on to stage 2 and more or less maintains the same rate until stage 3 is
reached. Stage 2, also called the secondary stage, is the main platform of creep tests. Stage 3, also called
the tertiary stage, is characterized by a reduction in the cross-section and increase in creep rate.

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8 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Stage 3 is regarded as the failure region and should be avoided in service. In the design against creep
failure, two criteria are generally used. One is the creep rate, a/b, of stage 2 and the other is the rupture
stress at the end of service life. Tests are required to establish these criteria. However, it is not practical
to perform a real-time laboratory simulation for 30 or 40 years of service life. Therefore, extrapolations
are performed on data acquired from tests lasting for less than, for instance, a year or two. Although the
validity of an extrapolation is always cautioned, there are several general trends of creep that make
extrapolation reasonably acceptable. From the vast experimentaldata gathered, we have observed the
following general trends of creep:

(1) In log-log scale, applied stress and secondary stage deformation rate have a directly proportional
straight-line relationship.
(2) In log-log scale, rupture stress and time to rupture have an inversely proportional straight-line
relationship.
(3) In log-log scale, elongation at rupture and time to rupture have an inversely proportional straight-line
relationship.

Fig. 1.7
Creep at a given temperature

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9 PIPING STRESS ANALYSIS

Buckling - Stability Failure

The pipe can also fail due to stability, which is caused mainly by compressive stress. The stability problem occurs
mainly on large thin wall shells and pipes. However, it may also occur on thick pipes in a deepwater environment.
Figure 1.9 shows several situations that may have stability problem. Under external pressure, the first priority is to
get some idea about the potential buckling of a long segment of un-stiffened pipe. A long segment of pipe produces
two-lobe buckling with an allowable external pressure as

Where

E = modulus of elasticity

t = thickness

D = outside diameter

ν = Poisson’s ratio

The above equation includes a safety factor of 3 applied over the theoretical formula derived by Bresse-Bryan [21].
If the allowable external pressure is smaller than the design external pressure, either the pipe thickness is increased
or stiffening rings are applied to increase the allowable pressure. When the un-stiffened pipe segment is short, the
buckling may occur with two or more lobes depending on the diameter, thickness, and length. The procedure for
evaluating the buckling in this case is complicated, but fairly standardized.

Miscellaneous Modes of Failure

Other modes of failure include corrosion, erosion, stress corrosion, hydrogen attack. These modes of
failure are mainly caused by material selection and usage. We will only discuss them briefly. All piping is
designed with a predetermined corrosion allowance. This allowance mainly compensates for the loss of
material due to surface corrosion and is not related to the inter-granular corrosion, which will be discussed
later in this section. Corrosion affects the piping in two areas. One is, of course, the reduction in wall
thickness. The pipe has a definite life because of corrosion, which progresses continuously. Once the wall
thickness is reduced to the limit that is unable to resist the design pressure, the life of the pipe to serve
the given design condition is exhausted. The other effect of corrosion is the stress intensification of the
small corroded pits. These pits can greatly reduce the fatigue strength of the pipe against cyclic loading.
The rubbing of the flowing fluid against the pipe wall will erode the pipe wall to some extent. Slurry flow
erodes the wall the most due to the abrasiveness of the solids carried. Most two-phase flows also cause
significant erosion. Cavitation at pump suction is notorious for producing corrosion erosion. Even the
single-phase water flow can generate serious erosion [11] at carbon steel elbows when the flow velocity
and the water chemistry are right. Turbulence, low pH value, and low oxygen content are some of the
parameters that favor erosion on carbon steel pipe.

- M.A.