Development of analogy method for thermal-fatigue crack propagation in pressurized cylinder by using permeation diffusion-fracture model

Natural crack propagation analysis in thermal-fatigue fracture problem is a challenging problem. Reliable predictions for the crack path and residual live of structure provide essential information for the structural integrity assessment and repairment. Various conventional predictive fatigue models have been proposed to evaluate the remaining life, but most of them can't build an explicit relation between damage degree and fatigue life. In recent years, the advanced techniques on crack propagation analyses were proposed, which were used to simulate the fatigue crack growth, but no coupling thermal-fracture function existed in the commercial finite element codes. Fortunately, the extended finite element method (XFEM) in ABAQUS has the coupling permeation diffusion-fracture model. In this paper, an analogy method from coupling permeation diffusion-fracture to coupling thermal-fatigue is proposed to compute fatigue fracture, which is applied for predicting the fatigue life in a specific steam turbine by directly using ABAQUS. Typical fatigue experiments by compact specimens of cast iron are carried out for the fatigue parameters measurement. By using analogy method and Paris’ Law, an entire analysis process for the turbine units is built to estimate the thermal-fatigue life. The simulation results predicting remaining life and analyzing fatigue crack growth for the pressurized cylinder are agreed well with the measured engineering data.