Fatigue Life Evaluation for the Repair Methods of High Pressure Gas Pipeline
Abstract High pressure gas pipeline must maintain structural integrity during the design life. To do this, periodic pipeline inspections are carried out, and fitness-for-service assessments are performed on defects found by inspection. Defects that do not meet the evaluation criteria should be repaired and replaced to ensure the integrity of the pipeline structure at the same level as before the defect. High pressure gas pipeline repair method is applied to repair of composite reinforced sleeve and repair of steel sleeve. Although there have been many studies on the short-term structural integrity evaluation of rupture pressure in these repair methods, there is insufficient research to verify whether the long-term operation of the repair pipeline maintains the long-term structural integrity of the repaired pipe. In this study, an optimum process to improve structural integrity was established by investigating effect of the process variables on fatigue lifetime of steel-sleeve repair welds in buried gas pipeline. Residual stresses in the repair welds were derived through sequentially-coupled temperature-stress analysis using ABAQUS, which is a commercial finite element analysis program. In addition, variations of operating stresses were derived by finite element linear elastic stress analysis. Fatigue lifetimes of the steel-sleeve repair welds were evaluated by substituting the derived weld residual stresses and operating stress variations into the structural stress/fracture mechanics approach as input. Appling this method confirms long-term integrity over 200 years in terms of fatigue the abstract here in italics.