Abstract
Many pipes that are arranged longitudinally in ships have loops at intervals to prevent the failure of the pipes as they absorb large portions of the axial load caused by the bending of the hull girder and/or thermal loads when the pipes are carrying very hot fluids. Since the loops are curved at corners, an efficient method for conducting the structural analyses of these curved portions is required. In this paper, a pipe loop was analyzed by an analytical method and by the finite-element method in four different ways, i.e., based on straight-beam elements, curved-beam elements, 2-D shell elements, and 3-D solid elements. The results of the five analyses were compared to check the validity of the current curved-beam theory. The paper includes some suggestions on how to analyze the pipe loops efficiently.