(65ah) Assessment of the Mechanical Integrity of a Pipeline with Metal Loss, Using Finite Element Method

Following the guidelines proposed by the ASME B31G and API579 standards, for the assessment of systems that compromise its mechanical integrity, given the existence of defects associated with the presence of corrosion damage, the probability of failure of a pipeline, which transports hazardous materials associated with the Oil & Gas industry, and is exposed to pitting corrosión damage was calculated when it overcomes its yield stress. For this, a methodology that combines the corresponding structural analysis of the system and subsequent reliability analysis was proposed. Through the first, the calculation of the von Mises stress present in areas where the pitting defects was made; for this, the corrosion growth model to be used in the present work was defined by implementing the correlation proposed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to find out the corrosion rate growth in annual terms. Subsequently the pipeline section where the study would be carried out was defined, based on the results obtained in a previous study, which analyzed information related to corrosion damage present on the pipeline, collected through the In Line Inspection (ILI) technique. This allowed to restrict the test area to a total length of 80 cm and 1/8 section of pipe, lastly simulating the system and obtaining the loads associated with the von Mises stress affecting corrosion defined areas. For reliability analysis it was necessary to find the probability distribution function associated with the von Mises stress on the system studied; defining an experimental design which sought to evaluate different values of the random variables defined on the model proposed by SwRI, thus simulating the system a sufficient number of times in order to find the distribution of von Mises stress for this case study. With the distribution function defined, system reliability analysis was carried out through Monte Carlo simulations; thus, it was established that the limit state function would have a conventional structure comparing resistance with loads. Thus, the resistance was set as the yield stress of the material, while the load would be the von Mises stress, and thus the random variable from which random numbers governed by the probability distribution found previously were generated. As mentioned previously, it was defined that the present system fails when the von Mises stress exceeds the yield stress of the material; finding that for the time range evaluated (year one, five, ten and fifteen), the probability of failure is behaved as expected, increasing year by year if no maintenance is not performed to the pipeline section evaluated.