Study on Fracture Properties of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) Pipe

Butt-fusion welding is the main technology to join high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic pipes, which are widely used in transport the water, gas and corrosive liquid. Investigation shows that one of the failure modes of HDPE pipe is the crack slowly grows across the thick direction and leads to failure at last, so that it is very important to study the resistance to crack initiation of HDPE pipe and its butt-fusion welded joint. In this study, the elastic-plastic fracture mechanics parameter, crack opening displacement (COD) is used to describe the fracture initiation behaviors for the HDPE materials and its butt-fusion welded joints. The resistance to initiation fracture of HDPE pipe materials and butt-fusion welded joints were investigated at different temperature by using multiple specimen resistance curve method and silicon-rubber replica method. The results show that saturation initial crack COD- δis of HDPE pipe materials and butt-fusion welded joints decreases with the decreasing temperature. The δis of butt-fusion welded joints is lower than that of HDPE pipe materials. Investigation also proved that the silicon-rubber replica method is more suitable for HDPE engineering material than the multiple specimen method. At the same time the statistic distribution of the δis of HDPE butt-fusion welded joint was conducted. The results show that the value of the δis has the statistic variance inherently. The optimum fitting distribution of COD is Weibull distribution with three parameters.