Estimates of plastic loads for pipe bends under combined in-plane and out-of-plane bending moment

This paper provides a method to estimate plastic loads (defined by twice-elastic-slope) for pipe bends under combined in-plane and out-of-plane bending moment, based on detailed 3-D FE limit analyses using elastic-perfectly plastic materials. Because closing bending moment is always lower than opening bending moment, the combination of in-plane closing bending and out-of-plane bending moment becomes the most significant case. Due to conservatism of each bending moments, the resultant moment provided by ASME B and PV code is unduly conservative. However, the concept of the resultant moment is still valid. In this paper, FE results show that the accurate solutions of bending moments provide better estimates of plastic loads of pipe bend under combined in-plane bending and out-of-plane bending moment