FAILURE ASSESSMENT OF PIPE TEE ELEMENT USING CONTINUUM DAMAGE MECHANICS

In this work continuum damage mechanics was used to try to predict the occurrence of ductile rupture in a barred tee fitting subjected to pressure load. In order to account for the scatter in the material damage parameters, a stochastic definition was used. Ductile damage parameters were identified using failure data obtained from traction tests of round notched bar samples. The attention is concentrated on the possible failure of the grid since it occurrence can obstruct the pipe flow and drive the structural failure of the tee Numerical simulation indicates that the bars fail first but do not trigger the tee rupture. The location where ductile rupture is expected to initiate in the tee was found to be 30 out of the tee symmetry plane.