Open Access

Aida Nonn, Holger Brauer

• The safety assessment of flawed pressurized pipes requires the knowledge of toughness properties which are usually provided in terms of impact energy from standard full-sized CVN notch specimens. For pipes with wall thickness less than 10mm different Charpy standards allow for the application of sub-sized specimens. However, it is still not fully clear how the impact energy from sub-sizedThe safety assessment of flawed pressurized pipes requires the knowledge of toughness properties which are usually provided in terms of impact energy from standard full-sized CVN notch specimens. For pipes with wall thickness less than 10mm different Charpy standards allow for the application of sub-sized specimens. However, it is still not fully clear how the impact energy from sub-sized specimens can be used to evaluate the fracture resistance of the pipes and how this energy correlates to the one from the full-sized specimen. Although different empirical correlations between sub-sized and full-sized specimens exist in the literature their validity is questionable since they are based on the results for older generation of steels. In the recent years the application of damage mechanics models has been promoted to assess the fracture behavior and deformation capacity of pipelines. The main advantage of these models can be found in their capability to link the damage evolution and the underlying stress/strain condition. In this paper damage mechanics approach is applied to describe fracture behavior of X65 pipeline material. Within the damage mechanics approach, Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman (GTN) model is considered to be adequate for the simulation of ductile fracture. For brittle fracture, GTN model is extended by a propagation criterion which examines if the cleavage fracture stress is reached by the maximal principal stresses. The model parameters are calibrated and verified by means of load-displacement curves obtained from instrumented impact tests on different sized CVN specimens. This damage model is subsequently employed to simulate ductile-brittle transition behavior.…