Study on design pressure of in-service welding pipes (Q851261)

The authors present a numerical resolution of a heat equation which predicts the design pressure and the burn-through of an in-service welding pipe. The welding temperature evolves according to the heat equation \(\rho c_{p}\partial T/\partial t=\nabla (\lambda \nabla T)+\overline{Q}\), where \( \rho \) is the density, \(c_{p}\) is the specific heat, \(\lambda \) is the conductivity and \(\overline{Q}\) is the internal heat. The boundary conditions are either of convection type \(q_{c}=\alpha _{c}(T-T_{0c})\) or of radiation type \(q_{r}=\sigma _{0}\varepsilon _{0}(T^{4}-T_{0r}^{4})\), where \( T_{0c}\) and \(T_{0r}\) are reference temperatures and \(\alpha _{c}\), \(\sigma _{0}\) and \(\varepsilon _{0}\) are given coefficients. An internal heat generation is applied to the weld and the pipe is meshed through 8-node brick elements. The authors describe the influence of different parameters of the problem on peak temperatures at some points and on the design pressure. The final conclusion of the paper is that safe working pressure can be obtained within the situation under consideration.