Analysis of Unreinforced and Reinforced Tubular T-Joints Structures with Open Source Finite Element Software

Tubular Joints play quite a vital role in most of the marine structures. It is obvious that having full control about the capacity and strength of tubular joints would be very worthy to have good knowledge about the total performance of the structure. In recent years the application of the finite element method has become very popular in the analyses of different types of welded circular tubular joints. The rapid development of FE programs and computation facilities has extended the analyses in the study of stress distribution and load-displacement behavior of a joint to the assessment of the ultimate capacity. This thesis presents a numerical investigation using open source finite element analysis on tubular joints that are the main structural components of steel offshore structures. The studied joint is reinforced and unreinforced T-joint. In nowadays, several types of reinforcement are available to enhance the strength of tubular joints. Thus, for a better understanding of the static strength of joints, two common types of reinforcement plate (doubler and collar) were investigated. In this regards twelve T-Joint specimens subjected to axial brace load (6 in compression and 6 in tension) have been studied, with the different geometric, material property, and reinforced plate. In addition, different types of shell and solid finite elements are considered in this investigation. The shell elements are the linear triangular and quadrilateral elements and the solid elements are the linear tetrahedral and hexahedral elements. Also, this study was performed to investigate and report the usefulness of the open-source software programs Code\_Aster and Salome-Meca in implementing static finite element modeling of tubular joints.