The tubes and pipes manufacturing industry characterizes the mechanical properties of their products with a
wide selection of standards, but most of them are qualitative testing methodologies. To estimate the mechanical
properties from a quantitative point of view there are limited options in standards. In that sense, the standard
tensile test is the preferred alternative by the manufacturers, but this option limits the mechanical estimation
for the longitudinal direction of the tube–pipe product. Particular efforts have been made to design an
alternative mechanical testing procedure to characterize the mechanical properties in the hoop direction of
pipes and tubes. The Ring Hoop Tension Test (RHTT) was designed to fill this gap, but it shows limitations
related to the required tooling and the influence of the frictional contact between the tooling and the ring
specimen. In the nuclear industry, the Small Ring Test (SRT), a miniature test derivated from the RHTT, has
been investigated in recent years. In this investigation, a novel RHTT was designed to overcome the limitations
of SRT and RHTT, and a new procedure was implemented to estimate the yield strength of tubes and pipes.
Numerical FEM simulations were performed to reach an optimum estimation method for the yield strength with
the specific geometry of the SRT and a wide selection of pipe geometries with the RHTT. A set of hypothetical
materials were designed to perform these analyses, taking into account the influence of Young’s modulus,
proportional limit, hardening coefficient (based on the Ramberg–Osgood law), and presence of Lüders bands
straining. To verify the results obtained from this numerical FEM analysis, experimental tests (standard tensile
tests and RHTTs) and metallographic analysis were performed on aluminum Al 6063 T6 and copper C12200
R360 tubes, showing the capability of this optimized RHTT to estimate the yield strength in the hoop direction
for anisotropic tubes and pipes.
