Stresses at intermediate points on pipe

[Mr.Pipe]

Hello Community,

Generally the practice in piping stress analysis is to model the system without intermediate node breaks. There could be moments and forces all along the length of pipe contributing to stresses. Due to this limitation of beam element software's, is there a chance that a highly stressed point is missed in the analysis as no node was created at that point. Any insights on this ?

Thank you !

 

[GBTorpenhow]

No because the program only allows forces moments etc. to be applied at nodes. The way a beam element is defined there is no possibility for 'surprises' along its length in between nodes.

You can satisfy yourself on this by comparing two models, one with and one without many extraneous nodes, you should get the exact same results.

The program's visualization in terms of the color gradient display for stress may differ, like when importing a piping model with extraneous/artifact nodes at tee welds and just being lazy efficient and leaving them in, you get the whole color gradient for the branch stress crammed into a real short element, if you delete the extraneous nodes at the tee welds you get the same stress at the branch but a longer element so the stress color gradient can often look visually different, but the stresses end up being the same.