True stress and shakedown analysis of pressure vessel under repeated internal pressure

This study aims to investigate the true stress and the plastic shakedown behavior of a cyclically loaded pressure vessel. To serve this study, an experimental platform has been built up, which comprised of a self-made thin-wall cylinder pressure vessel, a water pressure loading system to simulate the actual working loading condition, and strain gauge sets for strain measurement. A number of experiments have been done by cyclically loading and unloading the vessel at different strain levels of plastic deformation to shakedown state in different experiments respectively. The relationship between plastic strain and shakedown range has therefore been obtained. The true stress-strain constitutive model of the vessel under large deformation condition has also been derived. The experiments lead to three observations: (1) the strain hardening technology can effectively reduce the residual stress of stainless steel pressure vessel. (2) The shakedown range is less than 2000 mu epsilon for a total strain under 4%, and yet the shakedown range increases fast to more than 3000 mu epsilon for a total strain higher than 6%. (3) It is also found that the true stress-strain constitutive model given in this paper describes the multi-axial stress-strain state of pressure vessels, and validates the engineering practicability of conventional uniaxial tensile shakedown constitutive curve.