Stress intensity factors and weight function for internal surface faults in cylindrical vessels

Failure of cylindrical vessels can be caused by stress singularity at pitting corrosion induced cracks. Literature suggests that most of research focuses on how to determine stress intensity factors for surface cracks with low aspect ratios, i.e.,a/c1.0. Situation may well arise where the aspect ratio of cracks is larger than one. This paper attempts to propose a weight function method to determine stress intensity factors for high aspect ratio semi-elliptical cracks in cylindrical vessels. The weight functions are derived based on three dimensional finite element analysis. The proposed weight function method is verified numerically. It is found that the higher the aspect ratio of cracks the larger the stress intensity factors, and that the aspect ratio of cracks may alter the failure mode of cylindrical vessels.