Fracture assessment of mismatched girth welds in oval-shaped clad pipes subjected to bending moment

This paper provides an engineering assessment of an oval-shaped clad pipes with a circumferential part-through surface crack subjected to bending moment based upon equivalent stress-strain relationship method (ESSRM) in conjunction with EPRI J-estimation procedure. Plastic limit load equations are developed specially to determine the equivalent stress-strain relationship of the welded clad pipe. Then, the conventional EPRI J-estimation procedure is extended to calculate J values of the equivalent configuration with oval cross-section converted from the welded clad pipe using the ESSRM. The validation of the ESSRM/EPRI estimation framework mentioned in the above is carried out by comparing with the results obtained from 3-D elastic-plastic finite element (FE) analysis.