Butt-fusion welding is the main technology to join high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic pipes, which are widely used in transport the water, gas and corrosive liquid. Investigation shows that one of the failure modes of HDPE pipe is the crack slowly grows across the thick direction and leads to failure at last, so that it is very important to study the resistance to crack initiation of HDPE pipe and its butt-fusion welded joint. In this study, the elastic-plastic fracture mechanics parameter, crack opening displacement (COD) is used to describe the fracture initiation behaviors for the HDPE materials and its butt-fusion welded joints. The resistance to initiation fracture of HDPE pipe materials and butt-fusion welded joints were investigated at different temperature by using multiple specimen resistance curve method and silicon-rubber replica method. The results show that saturation initial crack COD- δis of HDPE pipe materials and butt-fusion welded joints decreases with the decreasing temperature. The δis of butt-fusion welded joints is lower than that of HDPE pipe materials. Investigation also proved that the silicon-rubber replica method is more suitable for HDPE engineering material than the multiple specimen method. At the same time the statistic distribution of the δis of HDPE butt-fusion welded joint was conducted. The results show that the value of the δis has the statistic variance inherently. The optimum fitting distribution of COD is Weibull distribution with three parameters.

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In this paper, the reliability of welded pressure pipe with circumferential surface crack was calculated by using three dimensional stochastic finite element method. This method has overcome the shortcomings of conservative results in safety assessment with deterministic fracture mechanics method. The calculation of reliability was based on three dimensional elastic-plastic stochastic finite element program which was developed by ourselves. The effects of variables such as fracture toughness, bending moment and the depth of the circumferential surface crack on the structure reliability were also discussed. The calculation results indicate that the crack depth has great effect on the reliability of the welded pipe. When the mean value of the crack depth is changed from 3mm to 7mm, the failure probability of the welded pipe will change from 10-8 to 10-2. The bending moment also has great effect on the reliability of the welded pipe. When the mean value of moment is changed from10000 N.m to 15000 N.m, the failure probability of the welded pipe increases dramatically for the same circumferential crack depth. Irrespective of the changing of moment, the pipe has higher reliability if the crack depth is less than 5mm(a/t<0.5, t is the thickness of the pipe). The method has put forward a new way for safety assessment of welded pipe with circumferential surface crack.

The reliability of welded pressure pipe with circumferential surface crack was calculated by using 3-D stochastic finite element method. This method has overcome the shortcomings of conservative results in safety assessment with deterministic fracture mechanics method. The calculation of reliability was based on 3-D elastic-plastic stochastic finite element program which was developed by ourselves. The effects of variables such as bending moment, the inner pressure on the structure reliability were discussed. The calculation results indicate that the bending moment has great effect on the reliability of the welded pipe, and the inner pressure has little effect on the reliability of the welded pipe if the inner pressure is less than 10MPa. If the mean value of the inner pressure changed from 0.5MPa to 30MPa, the failure probability will changes from 10-6 to 10-2. The bending moment also has great effect on the reliability. When the mean value of moment is changed from10000 Nm to 15000 Nm, the failure probability of the welded pipe increases dramatically for the same inner pressure. Irrespective of the changing of moment, the pipe has higher reliability if the inner pressure is less than 6 MPa. The method has put forward a new way for safety assessment of welded pipe with circumferential surface crack.