An investigation on the effect of widespread internal corrosion defects on the collapse pressure of subsea pipelines

Deepwater subsea pipelines are an essential part of offshore oil and gas infrastructure, and it is a statutory requirement for operators to monitor the degradation of pipelines left-in-place at cessation of production. Collapse is one of the failure modes for subsea pipelines subjected to external pressure. Surface corrosion defects in subsea pipelines, either while still operational or after cessation of production, usually manifest as widespread or localized corrosion pits that are randomly spread on the steel surface. Extensive work has been done on predicting the collapse pressure of pipelines containing single corrosion defects however, the same cannot be said for randomly distributed corrosion defects. In this study, we investigate, for the first time, the effects of the geometry and coverage extent of widespread internal corrosion defects with random spatial distribution on the collapse pressure of pipelines using finite element analysis. The results show that corrosion defect depth and coverage surface area are the main defect geometric parameters that significantly influence on the collapse strength of pipelines with randomly distributed internal corrosion. An empirical function for predicting the collapse pressure of a corroded pipeline is developed to reduce the need for recurrent computational effort.