Pipe-Burst Through Gas-Detonation Calculation of Structural Deformations

Abstract

In the case of pipe damage caused by gaseous detonation, the question arises, how adjacent piping sections have been affected. For this, starting point and traveling direction of the wave are needed. Therefore a 1D analytic solution for the detonation wave was modified to take radial pipe expansion into account and was coupled to an axis-symmetric Finite Element (FE) model for structure. The starting point could then be gathered from the comparison of measurable damage with different simulated scenarios. First the general behavior of a gaseous 1D detonation wave in a rigid tube with following rarefaction wave is discussed, an analytical solution is then presented and prepared to be linked to the FE code. Afterwards a correction is introduced to take radial expansion of the tube walls into account. Second, modeling of the structure is described shortly. Then the results of the coupled calculations are presented and compared to real deformations which could be observed. Using a fairly simple modeling approach, results show that an identification of the starting point of the detonation wave was clearly possible. In addition, the presented case suggests that the propagation direction of a gas detonation can be read from the radial tube deformations without even performing any calculations.Copyright © 2004 by ASME