A study of the combined effects of erosions, cracks and partial autofrettage on the stress intensity factors of a thick walled pressurized cylinder

For the investigation of cracked problems in thick-walled pressurized cylindrical vessels, the displacement-based finite element method has become one of the main computational tools to extract stress intensity results for their fatigue life predictions. The process of autofrettage, practically from the partial autofrettage level of 30% to full autofrettage level of 100%, is known to introduce favorable compressive residual hoop stresses at the cylinder bore in order to increase its service life. In order to extract the fatigue life, stress intensity factors (SIFs) need to be obtained a priori. The necessity for determining SIFs and their practical importance are well understood. However, it is usually not a trivial task to obtain the SIFs required since the SIFs largely depend on not only the external loading scenarios, but also the geometrical configurations of the cylinder. Our recent work has shown that the Bauschinger effect (BE) may come into play and affect the effective SIFs significantly for an eroded fully autofrettaged thick-walled cylinder. In this study, we further investigate the SIFs for the Bauschinger effect dependent autofrettage (BEDA) and the Bauschinger effect independent autofrettage (BEIA) at various autofrettage levels. The crack is considered to emanate from the erosion's deepest point in a multiply eroded cylinder. The commercial finite element package, ANSYS v12, was employed to perform the necessary analysis. A two-dimensional model, analogous to the authors' previous studies, has been adopted for this investigation. The residual stress field of autofrettage process, based on von Mises yield criterion, is simulated by thermal loading. The combined SIFs are evaluated for a variety of relative crack lengths with cracks emanating from the tip of erosions with various geometrical configurations and span angles. The effective SIFs for relatively short cracks are found to be increased by the presence of the erosion and further increased due to the BE at the same autofrettage level, which may result in a significant decrease in the vessel's fatigue life. Deep cracks are found to be almost unaffected by the erosion, but may be considerably affected by BE as well as by the level of partial autofrettage.