First Major Improvements to the Two-curve Fracture Arrest Model

Main Objective

The proposed program has the objectives to make the first major improvements to the most commonly analysis for ductile fracture arrest toughness requirements for gas pipeline applications, as well as to develop experimental data that could be used for validation of more fundamental analyses in the future.

Public Abstract

A contract modification from DOT was finalized in May 2005 that will allow for development and application of more detailed instrumentation to measure the soil loads against the pipe during a dynamic ductile fracture event, as well as measuring the crack-tip-opening angle (CTOA) during the pipe burst tests. These new instrumentation devices will be applied to the small-scale burst tests being conducted in this program, then refined and applied to full-scale pipe burst tests being conducted in a cooperative effort. Additionally, there will be a much better characterization of the soils used in the small-scale burst tests in this program, as well as obtaining soil samples from burst test sites around the world. The initial instrumentation development will be completed in time for the small-scale tests to be conducted the end of August 2005. There are several full-scale tests to be conducted between July and the end of 2005. The instrumentation will be applied to those tests as it is developed, with all of the instrumentation being used on the November 2005 full-scale burst test.

Final Report

Two-curve Fracture Arrest Model (Software)

PIPE-DFRAC_setup.zip (9,481,150 bytes) [View] [Download/Save...]

Final report for this contract. A DVD+R containing all deliverables, i.e., final report, electronic data, photos, video, and computer code was sent to Elizabeth Skalnek on 5/31/07

Emc2_-First_major_improvement_to_BTC_final_report_-full_document.pdf (8,774,528 bytes) [View] [Download/Save...]