An Improved Thermo-Ratcheting Boundary of Pressure Pipeline

The thermal ratcheting boundary of pressure pipeline is a popular topic in nuclear power engineering. The existed thermal ratcheting boundary based on the Bree diagram is conservative for structures subjected to the thermo-mechanically coupled loadings since it was obtained only from an elastic-perfectly plastic model. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the existed thermal ratcheting boundary based on a reasonable constitutive model. The Bree diagram was validated firstly by the linear relationship between the plastic strain increment and mechanical stress by finite element method. And then the influences of different constitutive models, such as elastic-perfectly plastic, multi-linear kinematic hardening, Chaboche and Abdel Karim-Ohno models, on the thermal ratcheting boundary of pressure pipeline were investigated numerically. It is found that the elastic-perfectly plastic and multi-linear kinematic hardening models provide the lower and upper bounds for the thermal ratcheting boundary, respectively. Finally, an improved thermal ratcheting boundary by introducing the dimensionless axial tensile stress was proposed based on the Bree diagram, the improved thermal ratcheting boundary covered the present cases with different ratios of mechanical stress over thermal stress.