Effect of transient temperature on 304 stainless steel LPG tank structure using numerical simulation approach

Abstract

The use of numerical simulation approach to investigate the effect of transient boundary temperature on an LPG tank structure was investigated. Here, both transient thermal and structural system were coupled in ANSYS software version 19.2 to create an interaction between the thermal and mechanical load on the tank structure. The focus of this paper is to identify stress hotspot which may eventually lead to stress-corrosion using a non-linear solver. Literature has proven that temperature gradient acting on a material is a possible cause for failure in most engineering structures due to stress induced corrosion. In this study the effect of a time dependent change in the temperature of the material (304 stainless steel) was investigated. The temperature was set to increase from cryogenic to 30 °C, and the pressure which represents mechanical load was also implemented at the wall boundary. Results obtained showed that stress was concentrated at the principal plane connecting the tank roof to the cylindrical structure. However, a failure analysis was conducted were the mechanical load was increased to 3 × 10 43 Pa. It was found that the material failed after 1,000,000 s time steps and the tensile yield strength obtained from the stress-strain curve was lower than the material standard value. This can be explained with the concept that the action of temperature disrupted the material microstructure, hence, reduced the material stiffness to fracture. The stress-strain curve was validated with the standard plot for the 304 stainless steel material type.

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