Burst Pressure Prediction of Defective Pipelines Using a Damage Model

Rising energy, demand leads to increased oil and gas production. Pipelines are the safest and most efficient transportation mode used in the hydrocarbon industry. Often buried in ground or submerged in seabed, corrosion is one of the most important failure modes of buried pipes. Metal Loss due to corrosion represents a serious threat of pipelines integrity. It is therefore, very important to maintain their residual resistance so as to not penalize production, distribution and prevent catastrophic accidents. Semi-empirical models are still widely used by big companies to assess the residual strength of defective pipes but burst pressures estimation using these models are often conservative. Finite element method has proved to be a powerful tool in accurate prediction of burst pressures of corroded pipes. The present work consists in numerical study of corroded pipes resistance. The purpose is to monitor the stress evolution in damaged area for a good prediction of burst pressure, numerical results using a stress based on a damage models have been compared with experimental results.