Finite Element Analysis of Burst Pressure for Pipelines With Long Corrosion Defects

Abstract

Plastic collapse analysis and remaining burst strength determination are critical to a corroded pipeline in its fitness-for-service analysis and integrity assessment. For very long corrosion defects, the present authors proposed a theoretical solution for predicting the burst pressure of corroded pipe in terms of a newly developed average shear stress yield theory, and validated it using full-scale burst data for long real corrosion defects. This paper then presents a finite element analysis (FEA) procedure to determine the remaining burst pressure for a very long blunt defect. A burst failure criterion that is referred to as von Mises equivalent stress criterion is proposed first in reference to the von Mises theory. Detailed elastic-plastic FEA calculations are performed using ABAQUS for a series of corroded pipes with infinitely long defects in different widths. From the FEA results and using the proposed failure criterion, the numerical results of burst pressure are determined for the long defects. The results show that using the proposed failure criterion, the FEA simulation can accurately determine the burst pressure for corroded pipes with long defects that is consistent with the theoretical solution. The conventional assessment methods including ASME B31G, RSTRENG, PCORRC and LPC are also evaluated and discussed in comparison with the proposed theoretical solution of burst pressure for long corrosion defects.