Stress concentration analysis of internally ring-stiffened two-planar tubular KK-joints
Hamid Ahmadi, Rasoul Alinezhad, Adel Alizadeh Atalo
Abstract
The majority of tubular joints commonly found in offshore jacket structures are multi-planar and investigating the effect of loaded out-of-plane braces on the values of the stress concentration factor (SCF) in offshore tubular joints has been the objective of numerous research works. In the present research, data extracted from the stress analysis of 243 finite element (FE) models, verified against available numerical and experimental data, was used to study the effects of geometrical parameters on the chord-side SCFs in two-planar tubular KK-joints reinforced with internal ring stiffeners subjected to balanced axial loading of braces which is usually the dominant loading type in a KK-joint. Parametric FE study was followed by a set of nonlinear regression analyses to develop three new SCF parametric equations.