Parametric study on the fracture mechanics analysis of elbow with surface crack

During IPIRG-2 program, various experiments and numerical analyses for surface cracked elbow had been performed, and thereafter the analytical code named IP2ELBOW was developed. However, because of the inherent limitation of this code to predict fracture behavior of cracked elbow, the necessity of further investigation was issued. For this reason, in this paper, engineering analyses and 3-dimensional finite element analyses for cracked elbow with internal pressure and bending load were carried out varying elbow geometry(Rm/t), crack depth(a/t) and crack size(2c/πD). These analysis results were compared each other and with the corresponding experimental data. Finally, additional assessment was also conducted to provide better insight into the effect of dead weight load.