ANALYSIS OF THE FAILURE BEHAVIOR OF LONGITUDINALLY FLAWED PIPES AND VESSELS

A post-calculation by means of four engineering approaches, based on t oughness, yield stress, plastic instability and ligament stress criter ia, was made of the failure pressure on 134 pipes and vessels. The cal culation was assessed by comparing the calculated with the experimenta lly obtained results. A statistical-based evaluation was made, since t he results from the calculation and the experiment are affected by nat ural scattering of characteristic values, such as material properties and geometrical dimensions, among others. It was possible to find for each equation an individual weighting factor, which helped to improve considerably the approximation of the calculation to the experimentall y determined failure pressure.