Stress analysis of curved pipes with a hybrid formulation

摘要

This work describes a hybrid formulation based on variational techniques, where unknown functions are combined with Fourier trigonometric expansions. The unknown functions refer to the toroidal shell distortion along the longitudinal direction, when the shell is submitted to generalised in-plane forces in the linear-elastic stress field. This set of functions is obtained by carrying out evaluations with a mathematical computer system to solve a system of differential equations, using eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors in the complex field. The analytical solution here developed is exact for each Fourier term used. The resulting stress distribution agrees very well with other methods obtained using a total expansion of trigonometric functions in the longitudinal and meridional directions.