3D Surface Acquisition and Reconstruction for Assessing the Extent of Strain Ratcheting and Wrinkling in Steel Tubulars

Cyclic axial loads in steel tubular might lead to local buckling, wrinkling and accumulation of plastic strains in the tube. During their life time steel tubes may also experience different types of material loss such as corrosion or thinning. This paper deals with the effects of corrosion defects on the strain ratcheting response of steel tubes. Small scale un-corroded and corroded tubular specimens have been tested under monotonic and cyclic axial loads. Optical system ATOS has been used for 3D surface acquisition and reconstruction of the tested specimen and to evaluate their strain ratcheting and wrinkling response. This is a camera-based triangulation system. A processing unit employs optical transform equations to automatically and with a great accuracy calculate 3D coordinates for every pixel of camera. Depending on camera resolution as an effect of such a scan a cloud of up to 4 million points has been obtained for every single measurement. From the results, it has been noticed that the possibility of ratcheting or progressive plastic failure substantially increases by the presence of the corrosion defects. With the corroded specimens, the strain ratcheting behaviour in the defected zone has been distinctively different from that in the perfect zones.