Approaches to Qualify Strain-Based Design Pipelines

The importance of using strain-based design pipelines is growing due to the increasing number of projects in challenging environments such as permafrost, offshore ice hazards, active seismic areas, and in high temperature/high pressure operations. To ensure pipeline integrity in environmentally sensitive areas and overall cost effectiveness, a strain-based design approach needs to consider all key interrelated design aspects including strain demand, design methods, material selection, strain capacity validation, and impact on construction and operation. To that end, significant research and development efforts have been made by the industry to facilitate the qualification of strain-based designed pipelines. This paper describes methods developed for the qualification of strain-based design pipelines, and demonstrates how recently developed strain capacity prediction tools, calibrated by full scale testing, can facilitate concept selection, material qualification and integrity verification of such pipelines.Copyright © 2010 by ASME