Abstract
To investigate the effect of load changing on creep fatigue life of pipe joints, a creep fatigue analysis was conducted by introducing evaluation method of the creep fatigue life developed by Arai et al. to Idealized Explicit FEM which can perform large scale nonlinear structural analysis with realistic computing resources. First, an analysis for simulating experimental phenomena was performed and the predicted creep fatigue life was compared with the measured one to verify the analysis accuracy. As a result, it was confirmed that the predicted creep fatigue life by the constructed method was in good agreement with the actual creep fatigue life. In addition, the predicted fracture locations by the analysis and the actual damage locations agreed each other. To confirm the effects of the bending and torsional moments, 203 different bending torsional conditions were assumed and their analyses were performed. It is found that the creep fatigue life can be shorter with the larger bending moment ratio.
