Determination of the critical length of the crack-like flaws and its effect on safety

Methodologies of API 579 have been widely accepted as the de-facto standard guideline for fitness for service assessment on crack-like flaws in pressure equipment. For different purposes and needs, the evaluation is divided into three levels, from critical length estimation in level 1, use of the failure analysis diagram (FAD) in level 2, to performing finite element stress analysis in level 3, that is from simplified to accurate. It is generally considered safe as long as the crack is smaller than the critical crack, but not all of them are actually the case. Therefore, it is very important to study the physical meaning behind the critical crack and understand the conservativeness of it. In this study, numerous examples of critical cracks determined according to API 579 Level 1 were put into Level 2 analysis for comparison. Each case is mapped onto the FAD of level 2 analysis to see its position and distance from the borderline between safe and danger zones. A huge amount of examples covering the majority of possible scenarios, including the geometry, thickness, inner diameter, pressure and half-length of the flaw, depth of the crack, crack tip and crack bottom, as a whole, there are 960 cases to be analyzed. Results show that cracks on the circumferential direction of the cylindrical and spherical vessels are distributed tightly in a small area far from the borderline on the FAD diagram. In these cases, the vessel is actually not as dangerous as the critical crack implies, since most of the points lie quite far from the danger zone. As for the longitudinal cracks of a cylindrical vessel, the results are scattered around, and three data points are located outside the allowable zone. The peculiar results are partly due to a discrepancy of interpolating procedure as the influence coefficient is being computed. Through this study, it is also found that the cumbersome process of estimating the critical crack length can be greatly simplified for longitudinal cracks in a cylindrical vessel.