Failure Pressure Evaluation of Corroded Pipeline Using Semi-Empirical and Finite Element Analysis

Abstract Computational simulation using the finite element method (FEM) has proven to be one of the most efficient methods for the correct evaluation of the structural integrity of pipelines with corrosion-induced defects. In this paper, the results of the failure pressure of corroded pipelines obtained with a computer tool called PIPEFLAW based on nonlinear finite element analyses are presented and compared with the failure pressures of corroded pipes obtained with twelve (12) advanced semi-empirical models from the literature. A computational code was created in the Python language to automatically obtain the failure pressure of randomly generated cases of corroded pipes, which allows the analysis of multiple piping cases with isolated external corrosion defects in an idealized configuration. For this purpose, the LHS (Latin Hypercube Sampling) approach was adopted for the design of experiments to obtain a better distribution of cases in the sample space. Comparisons between the results using the FEM and semi-empirical models show, as expected, that the semi-empirical solutions are more conservative in most cases analyzed in this work. A statistical model is proposed that adheres to the relative error distribution for some of the models used. Moreover, the influence of some parameters (pipeline thickness, defect depth, defect length, defect width, yield stress and ultimate stress) on the failure pressure was evaluated. It was found that in most of the studied models the error increases as the defect depth increases.