Abstract：This paper briefly reviews the authors’ systematic research achievements over the past 20 years in their research field——plastic limit and shakedown analyses of structures and their engineering applications to safety assessment of pressure vessels and piping. Attention is focused on introducing some typical advanced numerical methods and ideas proposed by the authors, describing a general approach and procedure of applying limit and shakedown analysis theories to solve practical engineering problems and on highlighting some typical and successful engineering application cases. These results not only possess theoretical innovation and development, but also have solved the key technical problems in engineering. They form a relatively complete and general purpose application theory system in this area and have been adopted by the national standard of China（GB/T19624-2004）and technical codes of government.
2010, Vol. 31 
