Determination of the optimum temperature history of inlet water for minimizing thermal stresses in a pipe by the multiphysics inverse analysis

Abstract

It is important to reduce the thermal stresses for managing and extending the lives of pipes in plants. In this problem, heat conduction, elastic deformation, heat transfer, liquid flow should be considered, and therefore the problem is of a multidisciplinary nature. An inverse method was proposed by the present authors for determining the optimum thermal load history which reduced transient thermal stress considering the multidisciplinary physics. But the obtained solution had a problem that the temperature increasing rate of inner surface of the pipe was discontinuous at the end time of heat up. In this study we introduce temperature history functions that ensure the continuity of the temperature increasing rate. The multidisciplinary complex problem is decomposed into a heat conduction problem, a heat transfer problem, and a thermal stress problem. An analytical solution of the temperature distribution of radial thickness and thermal hoop stress distribution is obtained. The maximum tensile and compressive hoop stresses are minimized for the case where inner surface temperature Ts(t) is expressed in terms of the 4th order polynomial function of time t. Finally, from the temperature distributions, the optimum fluid temperature history is obtained for reducing the thermal stresses.