Safety and reliability assessment of external corrosion defects assessment of buried pipelines—soil interface: A mechanisms and FE study

Due to local liquid accumulation (AL) in the low-lying section of the buried natural gas pipeline, external corrosion will occur at the interface between the pipeline and the soil. External corrosion will produce pit defects, which will reduce the bearing capacity of the pipeline and affect the normal operation of the pipeline. In addition, corrosion group defects can interact with each other. Thus, the service life of the pipeline is seriously affected. In this work, a case of local corrosion failure of the pipeline caused by liquid accumulation on-site is presented. The importance of this work is verified by experiment and field excavation. Besides, based on the Mises-Stress yield criterion, nonlinear analysis was carried out with the finite element method (FEM). The effects of internal pressure, corrosion pit defect size, internal and external wall corrosion, corrosion pit group, and different types of volumetric corrosion pit defects on the failure of L360QS steel pipe were analyzed with consideration of the effects of axial and circumferential zones of corrosion pits. These correlations have not been seen in previous studies. The FE results make up for the disadvantage that the corrosion is simplified to equal depth corrosion in the code, which will underestimate the residual strength of the actual corroded pipeline and lead to unnecessary repair or replacement. The results provide a reference for failure analysis and strength evaluation of buried L360QS steel pipe with corrosion defect.