It is widely recognised that the use of elastic-plastic over traditional design methods can result in significantly more efficient designs. For perforated tubesheets, the analysis is most conveniently performed using an equivalent solid (EQS) plate with elastic constants and yield stresses equal to those of the actual perforated tubesheet. An obstacle in using the EQS method is the complicated anisotropic yielding behaviour of the perforated material, which cannot be modelled correctly with the material models contained in existing finite element (FE) packages.
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