Assessment of an engineering approach to the evaluation of the cod of off-centered crack in pipes under bending for LBB design

In this work the applicability and the accuracy of the hodograph cone method (HCM) for estimating the COD profile of off-centered cracks in pipe under bending load has been verified by means of extensive finite element analysis. Numerical simulation results have been supported by experimental measurements. The need to develop appropriated numerical model for off-centered cracks configurations and the guidelines to follows in order to get accurate results are discussed. Experimental measures performed by means of digital image correlation (DIC) confirmed both the accuracy of the FEM model used in this work as well as the robustness of HCM. A correction for further improvement of the HCM accuracy and its extension to large crack length is proposed.