FG Baustatik, Stahlbau, FEM
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In case of cyclic loading, strain may accumulate due to a ratcheting mechanism until the state of shakedown is possibly achieved. Design Codes frequently require strain limits to be satisfied at the end of the specified lifetime of the structure. In addition, the strain range is required for performing fatigue analyses in case of plastic shakedown. However, little guidance is usually provided by Design Codes on how the accumulated strains and strain ranges are to be calculated, and some of the guidelines implemented in Design Codes are not well founded and may therefore be misleading. This is, for example, true for the ASME B&PV Code, Section III. Of course, strains and strain ranges can be determined by means of incremental elastic-plastic analyses, which require to go step-by-step through many cycles of a given load histogram until the state of shakedown is reached. This is rather costly in terms of engineering time and numerical effort. As an alternative, simplified methods can be adopted, e.g. the Simplified Theory of Plastic Zones (STPZ) as used in the present paper. Being a direct method, effects from load history are disregarded. The theory is described shortly and illustrated by some examples. It is shown that the Simplified Theory of Plastic Zones is well suited to provide reasonable estimates of strains accumulated in the state of elastic and plastic shakedown at the cost of few linear elastic analyses.
Progressive deformation (ratcheting) can occur as a response to variable loads as soon as the elastic limit is exceeded. If this is the case, strains and displacements accumulate in the event of cyclic loading in each load cycle. Widely known as triggers for ratcheting and already being considered in some design codes are configurations, in which a structure is subjected to at least two different types of load, namely a constant load (the primary load) and a superimposed cyclic load. In this paper, another mechanism that generates ratcheting is introduced. It can be attributed solely to the effect of a single load. In the simplest case, this can be explained by the successive activation of (an infinite number of) plastic hinges if a load of constant magnitude is moved in space. The increments of strains and displacements can decrease or increase from cycle to cycle, when the material is hardening, or if elastic foundation is present, or if the equilibrium condition is formulated for the deformed system (second-order theory) or if “large” rotations are taken into account (third-order theory).
After distinguishing material ratcheting and structural ratcheting, different phenomena related to structural ratcheting are gathered. Ratcheting of elastic–plastic structures observed with stationary position of loads is distinguished from ratcheting with moving loads. Both categories are illustrated by examples. The effect of evolution laws for the internal variables describing kinematic hardening on the accumulation of strain due to a ratcheting mechanism, and whether the ratcheting mechanism ceases with the number of cycles so that the accumulated strains are limited, is discussed. Some conditions are shown, under which the Chaboche model can lead to shakedown. Scenarios where shakedown is guaranteed at every load level, or where it may or may not occur at a specific load level, or where it definitely cannot occur at any load level, are distinguished. Correspondingly, the usefulness of shakedown analyses, which are searching for maximum load factors assuring shakedown, or direct (or simplified) methods to obtain postshakedown quantities by avoiding incremental cyclic analyses is discussed.