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EXPANSION AND FLEXIBILITY

John E. Brock* Engineering materials experience changes in dimensions as a result of application of stress, change in temperature, passage of time, change in internal configuration, changes in dissolved moisture content, and possibly a few other causes. Of these the first two are by far the most important as far as piping is concerned. Piping should be designed so that time-dependent inelastic effects such as creep and relaxa- tion are of negligible importance (although relaxation of bolting may be important in high-temperature flanged joints). Creep will be discussed briefly later in this chapter. Materials selected for piping service should be stabilized and should be used at temperatures for which there is no significant change in internal structure. Moisture content is obviously not of significance in metallic piping. Thus, essentially, dimensional changes in piping material depend upon changes in temperature and stress. The complex problem of determining the stress distribution in a solid body subjected to a change in temperature is treated in books by Timoshenko and Goodier,245t Gatewood,116 and Holey and Wiener.~5 Generally speaking, these methods and results are applicable to stress determination in individual piping components, such as valve bodies, straight cylindrical runs of pipe, etc., rather than to an entire piping system. Advances in nuclear engineering have produced an .Professor of Mechanical Engineering, U.S. Naval Post-graduate School, Monterey, Calif. This chapter was contributed in June, 1963, and, except for certain changes made by the editor, represents the professional position of the author at that time. t Superscript numbers ~fer to bibliographical references at the end of this chapter. 4-1

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