Simplified determination of accumulated strains to satisfy design code requirements

摘要

In case of cyclic loading, strain may accumulate due to a ratcheting mechanism until the state of shakedown is possibly achieved. Design Codes frequently require strain limits to be satisfied at the end of the specified lifetime of the structure. In addition, the strain range is required for performing fatigue analyses in case of plastic shakedown. However, little guidance is usually provided by Design Codes on how the accumulated strains and strain ranges are to be calculated, and some of the guidelines implemented in Design Codes are not well founded and may therefore be misleading. This is, for example, true for the ASME B&PV Code, Section III. Of course, strains and strain ranges can be determined by means of incremental elastic-plastic analyses, which require to go step-by-step through many cycles of a given load histogram until the state of shakedown is reached. This is rather costly in terms of engineering time and numerical effort. As an alternative, simplified methods can be adopted, e.g. the Simplified Theory of Plastic Zones (STPZ) as used in the present paper. Being a direct method, effects from load history are disregarded. The theory is described shortly and illustrated by some examples. It is shown that the Simplified Theory of Plastic Zones is well suited to provide reasonable estimates of strains accumulated in the state of elastic and plastic shakedown at the cost of few linear elastic analyses.