A new finite element for generalized in-plane pipe loading. Experimental and numerical comparison
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
In structural engineering, the geometry of a large number of structural details
may involve the combination of straight and curved parts in order to meet
requirements of functionality and/or attractive design. Piping systems are
structural elements used in the chemical industry, aeronautical and aerospace
engineering, conventional and nuclear power plants and fluid transport in
general-purpose process equipment. This paper presents a new finite element
pipe with 19 degrees of freedom, where shape functions are set-up from the
displacement field parallel to a local reference system. A displacement-based
formulation was developed with Fourier series for increasing the structural
element distortion capabilities. A finite element pipe may be considered as a
part of a toroidal shell. The stress field distribution may be calculated for any
cylindrical section pipe. Experimental set-up will be presented for in-plane
piping system loading case and experimental stress measurement will be
compared with the numerical stresses results obtained with this formulation
and with other different commercial codes. The main advantage of this
formulation is associated with timeless mesh generation with low number of
elements and nodes. Considerable computational effort may be reduce with
the use of this finite element pipe.
