Improving the Fatigue Performance of Welded Tubular Connections via Flared and Thickened Pipe Ends

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghiath Guy Mansour

Abstract Fatigue is a primary challenge in the design of steel catenary risers (SCRs) and different measures and methods are utilized to mitigate it. Traditional upset ends and steel lazy wave risers (SLWRs) are such methods to mitigate fatigue. SLWRs were first used in 2009 on the Espirito Santo floating, production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel of Shell Company's Parque das Conchas (BC-10) project offshore Brazil. SLWRs have been used increasingly since then and gained popularity especially in recent years. A novel patented tubular connection assembly referred to as Flared Thickened Ends (FTEs) improves the fatigue life of SCRs and welded connections in general. This novel assembly has many advantages. It overcomes the thickness limitation of welding traditional upset ends and reduces offshore welding time, cost, and risk. When FTEs are used in simple SCRs, they render simple SCRs a robustly viable alternative at significantly lower cost, shorter schedule, and with many additional advantages as compared to SLWRs. Of the many advantages, simple SCRs are more straightforward to configure, analyze, design, and install using varied installation methods and vessels. Simple SCRs use less materials and offer better long-term integrity, especially for insulated SCRs. In addition, they have a smaller footprint and are less prone to clashing than SLWRs.

Author(s):  
Ghiath (Guy) Mansour

Abstract Fatigue is a primary challenge in the design of steel catenary risers (SCRs) and different measures and methods are utilized to mitigate it. Traditional upset ends and steel lazy wave risers (SLWRs) are such methods to mitigate fatigue. SLWRs were first used in 2009 on the Espirito Santo floating, production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel of Shell Company’s Parque das Conchas (BC-10) project offshore Brazil. SLWRs have been used increasingly since then and gained popularity especially in recent years. A novel patented tubular connection assembly is presented herein which improves the fatigue life of SCRs and welded connections in general. This novel tubular connection assembly has many advantages. It overcomes the thickness limitation of welding traditional upset ends and reduces offshore welding time, cost, and risk. When used in simple SCRs, this novel tubular connection assembly renders simple SCRs an alternative robustly viable at significantly lower cost, shorter schedule, and many additional advantages as compared to SLWRs. Of such many advantages, simple SCRs are simpler to configure, analyze, design, and install using wider installation methods and vessels. They also use less material and offer better short- and long-term integrity especially for insulated SCRs. In addition, they have smaller footprint and are less prone to clashing.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (20) ◽  
pp. 6163
Author(s):  
Gang Xu ◽  
Yixin Zhou ◽  
Yu Zhu ◽  
Rui Wang ◽  
Xianhua Chen

The long-term effect of climate factors, such as sunlight, oxygen, and water, leads to the performance degradation of the asphalt mastic, which is the binding part in the asphalt mixture. It is not conducive to satisfy the long-term performance requirements of long-life asphalt pavement. In this study, five kinds of base asphalt mastic and styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) modified asphalt mastic were prepared with the filler-asphalt ratio of 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, and 1.4. The indoor simulated weather aging tests were carried out considering multi-factors including sunlight, oxygen, and water. The master curves of the complex shear modulus and phase angle of the asphalt mastic with different aging degrees were obtained by the frequency sweep test. The curves of fatigue damage characteristics and fatigue life were fitted based on the viscoelastic continuum damage (VECD) model. The influence of weather aging on the viscoelasticity and fatigue performance of asphalt mastic were analyzed. Results indicated that the effect of weather aging increases the elastic component and decreases the viscous component. The fatigue performance of SBS modified asphalt mastic was better than that of base asphalt mastic. As the aging degree deepens, the brittle failure characteristics of asphalt mastic with a higher filler–asphalt ratio were more obvious. The base asphalt mastic becomes more sensitive to the strain level due to weather aging, and its fatigue life increased under the low strain loading and decreased under the high strain loading. The fatigue performance of SBS modified asphalt mastic was less sensitive to the strain level. The fatigue life reduced after aging under low and high strain load. Taking the impact of weather aging on the fatigue performance into consideration, the optimal filler–asphalt ratios of the base asphalt mastic SBS modified asphalt mastic are 1.0 and 1.2, respectively.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 2288
Author(s):  
Guo-Xi Fan ◽  
Fan-Tong Lin ◽  
Peng Li ◽  
Ji-Gang Han ◽  
Huai-Shuai Shang ◽  
...  

Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors, with excellent properties, have been widely adopted to monitor the mechanical parameters in civil engineering in recent years. On the other hand, the current study on fatigue performance of corroded prestressed steel strands is still limited, and this is mainly because the long-term strain conditions monitoring is difficult to conduct. Based on the aforementioned considerations, a total of six beam specimens were fabricated in this study. The loading mode of four points bending was adopted in the form of sinusoidal waves in the experiments. On basis of the experimental results, it can be concluded that the fatigue life of the beam decreases sharply with the increase of the corrosion rate of steel strands. Besides, with the increase of the maximum fatigue load, the fatigue life of the beam will decrease significantly. Furthermore, the existing fatigue damage of steel strand inside the beam before corrosion may further accelerate its fatigue failure. As a result, the fatigue life of the beam is reduced because of the stress concentration. Under the same external load, the strain increment and the residual strain of steel strands in the stages of loading and unloading after corrosion increase significantly compared with other stages, while the existing residual strain always shows an increasing trend at various static loading stages. Therefore, the corrosion of steel strand seriously affects not only its mechanical properties, but also its fatigue performance. Finally, the FBG sensors are capable of measuring the steel strand strain, as well as the long-term strain conditions.


Author(s):  
John Toye

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 763 ◽  
pp. 867-874
Author(s):  
Yu Shu Liu ◽  
Ke Peng Chen ◽  
Guo Qiang Li ◽  
Fei Fei Sun

Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) are effective energy dissipation devices. The key advantages of BRB are its comparable tensile and compressive behavior and stable energy dissipation capacity. In this paper, low-cycle fatigue performance of domestic BRBs is obtained based on collected experimental data under constant and variable amplitude loadings. The results show that the relationship between fatigue life and strain amplitude satisfies the Mason-Coffin equation. By adopting theory of structural reliability, this paper presents several allowable fatigue life curves with different confidential levels. Besides, Palmgren-Miner method was used for calculating BRB cumulative damages. An allowable damage factor with 95% confidential level is put forward for assessing damage under variable amplitude fatigue. In addition, this paper presents an empirical criterion with rain flow algorithm, which may be used to predict the fracture of BRBs under severe earthquakes and provide theory and method for their engineering application. Finally, the conclusions of the paper were vilified through precise yet conservative prediction of the fatigue failure of BRB.


Author(s):  
Haigen Cheng ◽  
Cong Hu ◽  
Yong Jiang

AbstractThe steel structure under the action of alternating load for a long time is prone to fatigue failure and affects the safety of the engineering structure. For steel structures in complex environments such as corrosive media and fires, the remaining fatigue life is more difficult to predict theoretically. To this end, the article carried out fatigue tests on Q420qD high-performance steel cross joints under three different working conditions, established a 95% survival rate $$S{ - }N$$ S - N curves, and analyzed the effects of corrosive media and high fire temperatures on its fatigue performance. And refer to the current specifications to evaluate its fatigue performance. The results show that the fatigue performance of the cross joint connection is reduced under the influence of corrosive medium, and the fatigue performance of the cross joint connection is improved under the high temperature of fire. When the number of cycles is more than 200,000 times, the design curves of EN code, GBJ code, and GB code can better predict the fatigue life of cross joints without treatment, only corrosion treatment, and corrosion and fire treatment, and all have sufficient safety reserve.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 111-112
Author(s):  
Rajiv Nagaich ◽  
Carol Redfield ◽  
Ben Harvill

Abstract Ten thousand turn 65 daily. Majority look forward to retiring in the beginning and then become afraid of outcomes they often hear about- dealing with institutional care, becoming a burden, or running out of money. This is not because retirees do not plan, but despite of having planned their entire life for retirement. Many employers provide financial retirement planning such as a 401K plan. Individuals have relied on employee benefit plans to ready themselves, yet few are “very confident” about it. Two-thirds of retirees say their most recent employers did “nothing” to help them transition into retirement; 16% are “not sure” what their employers did. Many may be overlooking important factors in their strategies. Among retirees who currently have a retirement strategy, 85% have factored Social Security and Medicare benefits into their strategy. Most have included on-going living expenses (79%), total savings and income needs (57%) into their plan. Fewer than half have considered other critical factors (e.g., investment returns, ongoing healthcare costs, inflation, long-term care needs, tax planning, etc.). Only 9% have contingency plans for retiring sooner than expected and/or savings shortfalls. The truth is that education offered by employers tends to be traditional planning advice, which may not be enough to address the concerns retirees will have in retirement. To this, we introduce a multi-disciplinary LifePlanning Framework which takes a wholistic, integrated approach in addressing the many complex issues of retirement found in health, housing, finance, legal, and family. Our results may impact future practice, research, and policy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Marc W. Herr ◽  
Aurora G. Vincent ◽  
Meghan A. Skotnicki ◽  
Yadranko Ducic ◽  
Spiros Manolidis

AbstractRadiation therapy plays a critical role in the treatment of malignancies involving the head and neck. Although the therapeutic effects of ionizing radiation are achieved, normal tissues are also susceptible to injury and significant long-term sequelae. Osteoradionecrosis of the temporal bone (ORNTB) is among the many complications that can arise after therapy. ORNTB is a debilitating and potentially lethal condition that continues to challenge patients and treating physicians. Herein, we review the pathophysiology, presentation, work-up, and management of ORNTB.


1991 ◽  
Vol 130 ◽  
pp. 353-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Hall

AbstractSpottedness, as evidenced by photometric variability in 277 late-type binary and single stars, is found to occur when the Rossby number is less than about 2/3. This holds true when the convective turnover time versus B–V relation of Gilliland is used for dwarfs and also for subgiants and giants if their turnover times are twice and four times longer, respectively, than for dwarfs. Differential rotation is found correlated with rotation period (rapidly rotating stars approaching solid-body rotation) and also with lobe-filling factor (the differential rotation coefficient k is 2.5 times larger for F = 0 than F = 1). Also reviewed are latitude extent of spottedness, latitude drift during a solar-type cycle, sector structure and preferential longitudes, starspot lifetimes, and the many observational manifestations of magnetic cycles.


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