An estimation of the high-pressure pipe residual life

The paper presents an estimation of the residual life of the power plant high-pressure pipe, which has been in exploitation for years. A crack was noticed in the pipe, thus it was necessary to estimate the pipe material residual life until its eventual failure. The combined methodology for residual life estimation, which consists of experimental and numerical investigations, was developed. The samples were taken directly from the real high pressure pipe and material properties were determined experimentally, both at room and elevated (operational) temperature. The experimental results also served for the verification of the developed numerical methodologies. The FEM and the X-FEM methods were used for the residual life numerical estimation of the high pressure pipe. The stress and strain fields, used for the estimate, were obtained by application of the Paris' law. The final verification of numerical results was realized by comparing the critical crack length to the experimentally obtained value.