Nowadays, the safe operation of HP-HT subsea pipelines resting on seabed must take into account the thermal buckling phenomenon. The transport of oil with high pressure and temperature can cause uncontrolled thermal buckling in subsea pipelines. The failure risk must be carefully evaluated to design the pipeline with safety. Nowadays to control the thermal buckling the use of man made triggers is seen like the best solution for cost and safety of subsea pipelines. Some projects employ man-made triggers to control the thermal buckling in the last years around the world. In this article is presented the system and methodology used to test some solutions in a reduced scale model. Different geometric setups along the model line were tested. Solutions like sleepers, dual sleepers and buoyancy were tested and the geometric and structural behavior monitored. The reduced model has 195 m length, and was developed in the IPT Towing Tank, representing a pipeline section of almost 6 km long. Strains, temperature, pressure and displacements were measured in several sections of the model. Additionally, an imaging technique for the model geometry retrieval was developed. This paper presents the experimental setup developed to investigate the performance of man-made triggers solutions for HP-HT subsea pipelines.
Analytical study of lateral thermal buckling for subsea pipelines with sleeper
