Design and analysis of O-ring polymer gasket for flanged bolted joints in seawater piping using α-FEM

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 (Formula presented.) 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.