Interaction of welding residual stresses and warm pre-stressing on brittle fracture of a pipe containing an internal semi-elliptical crack

•Welding residual stresses are obtained for a welded pipe and verified experimentally.•A semi-elliptical cracked pipe is considered and modified Beremin model is used.•Welding residual stresses cause to increase the fracture probability, dramatically.•Effects of warm-prestress cycles and their interaction with welding RS were studied.•LCF cycle has more effect on improving fracture toughness in comparing with LUCF.•WPS can release crack tip welding RS and is recommended for welded pressure vessels.

Residual stresses (RS) due to welding process, may change the load bearing capacity of cracked components. These stresses can also affect the benefit of warm pre-stressing (WPS) cycles which are used for improving structure behaviour. RS are obtained from a two-passes welding simulation of a pipe and verified by experiments. A semi-elliptical internal crack at the weld line is considered. Redistribution of RS field after introducing the crack shows a significant tensile RS are remained at the crack tip. Two common WPS cycles, load-cool-fracture (LCF) and load–unload-cool-fracture (LUCF), are applied using the model at room and low temperature subjected to axial loading. Using local approach to fracture shows that welding RS dramatically raise the fracture probability. LCF has more influence on reducing the fracture probability in comparison with LUCF. The interaction of welding RS and WPS cycles still improves the fracture properties, however, welding RS cause to decrease the benefit of WPS. Comparing RS distributions on crack-tip shows that applying WPS cause to release a significant amount of welding RS and therefore, WPS can be very useful for welded structures. The near crack-tip opening stresses at a same fracture load are further studied for all cases.