Driving force and deformation analysis for dynamic crack propagation in gas pipelines under different boundary conditions

In the light of a growing need for fracture control of rapid crack propagation (RCP) in gas pipelines, a program PFRAC(Pipeline FRacture Analysis Code) has been developed^[1] to analyse the various events. In this paper, by using PFRAC for the simulation of axial crack propagation in gas pipelines, a number of dynamic analysis issues relating to boundary effects for uncracked and cracked pipes are investigated. This indicates that the boundary conditions along the length of the pipe play an important role for fracture analysis in the pipe. In contrast, the boundary conditions at the ends of a long pipeline have little effect on the dynamic fracture events.