Inelastic wrinkling and collapse of tubes under combined bending and internal pressure

The problem of inelastic bending and collapse of tubes in the presence of internal pressure is investigated using experiments and analyses. The experiments involve 1.5-inch diameter, D/t=52 stainless steel tubes bent to failure at fixed values of pressure. The moment–curvature response is governed by the inelastic characteristics of the material. Bending induces some ovalization to the tube cross section while, simultaneously, the internal pressure causes the circumference to grow. Following some inelastic deformation, small amplitude axial wrinkles appear on the compressed side of the tube, and their amplitude grows stably as bending progresses. Eventually, wrinkling localizes, causing catastrophic failure usually in the form of an outward bulge. Internal pressure stabilizes the structure, it increases the wavelength of the wrinkles and can increase significantly the curvature at collapse. The onset of wrinkling is established by a custom bifurcation buckling formulation. The evolution of wrinkling and its eventual localization are simulated successfully using a FE shell model. The material is represented as an anisotropic elastic–plastic solid using the flow theory, while the models are assigned initial geometric imperfections with the wavelength of the wrinkling bifurcation mode. It is demonstrated that successful prediction of collapse requires very accurate representation of the material inelastic properties including yield anisotropies, and that as expected, the collapse curvature is sensitive to the imperfection amplitude and wavelength imposed.