Inelastic structural design approach using their relaxation locus

kasahara, Naoto

Elevated temperature structural design codes pay attention to strain concentration at structural discontinuities due to creep and plasticity, since it causes to enlarge creep-fatigue damage of materials. One of the difficulties to predict strain concentration is its dependency on loading, constitutive equations, and relaxation time. This study investigated fundamental mechanism of strain concentration and its main factors. The results revealed that strain concentration was caused from strain redistribution between elastic and inelastic regions, which can be quantified by the characteristics of structural compliance. Characteristic of compliancc is controlled by elastic region in structures and is insensitive to constitutive equations. It means that inelastic analysis is easily applied to get compliance characteristics. By utilizing this fact, simplified inelastic analysis method was proposed based on charactelistics of compliance change for prediction of strain concentration.