A new finite element for generalized in-plane pipe loading. Experimental and numerical comparison

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.

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