Abstract
In this work, we propose to replace the conventional flat stainless steel gasket in flanged bolted joints used in seawater piping with an O-ring polymer gasket to provide a leak-proof joint under bolt preload. Modeled as hyperelastic material, the polymer gasket undergoes large deformation when sandwiched between the pipe flanges. To alleviate the commonly encountered problems due to element distortion, we use a variant of the smoothed finite element, the SFEM within Abaqus standard to simulate the flanged bolted joint. A systematic study is performed to arrive at an acceptable design for leak-proof flanged bolted joints.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was provided by the author(s).