Asymptotic numerical method for cyclic elasto-plasticity and its application to a steam turbine rotor

Abstract

Flexible operation of the conventional power plants is necessary for the integration of renewables in the energy mix. Steam turbine rotors are one of the most affected components due to the daily thermal load cycling requirements. In order to accurately study the effect of cycling on fatigue, it is necessary to solve cyclic 3D elasto-plasticity problems for a large number of cycles. The established methods are iterative in nature to arrive at the current yield surface for each elasto-plastic step and are computationally extensive. In this paper, we propose the non-iterative Asymptotic Numerical Method (ANM) based solution technique for 3D cyclic elasto-plasticity problems for the first time by a novel regularized Kuhn-Tucker condition. Regularization techniques used in previous works take care of the partial cycle only, i.e., elastic loading, elastic-plastic transition, elasto-plastic flow and elastic unloading for simple linear work hardening models of plasticity. In the present work, the proposed method extends the applicability of ANM by incorporating elastic-plastic transition and elasto-plasticity in reverse loading, second unloading and repeated loading for any number of cycles so that the computationally efficient fatigue analysis can be carried out. In addition, the extension also includes the application of ANM to non-linear kinematic hardening through the Chaboche plasticity model combined with isotropic hardening. For these advancements, additional regularizations are proposed and implemented in a Finite Element Code. The obtained results are then compared to the solutions obtained from the conventional Newton Raphson (NR) solution technique. The proposed ANM is applied to a steam turbine rotor undergoing a typical thermal load cycling and the cyclic elasto-plastic response is compared with that obtained using the conventional Newton Raphson solution technique.