Visualising creep exhaustion in a P22 girth weld

For pipings creep damage will localized to locations with degraded microstructures aggravated by triaxiality constraints. These unfavorable conditions are known to be found in the heat affected zone of welds. The influence of triaxiality in a girth weld has been studied using a new "creep exhaustion" filtering technique named ?-filtering. It has been developed for FEM analysis purposes to localize critical regions for creep exhaustion in components. The creep ductility expression for rigid plastic deformation has been used for visualizing the level of creep exhaustion in a P22 girth weld. The creep response of a 3 zone girth weld was modeled with the logistic creep strain prediction method and l-filtered in Comsol software. For comparison some calculations were performed with the Norton law implemented Abaqus software. Preliminary results of the -filtering show that the regions in the weld that are critical according to experience (interface between heat affected zone and parent material) are indeed highlighted by the filtering method.