Determination of Pipeline Yielding Occurred in Hydrostatic Pressure Testing

The pipeline industry has traditionally utilized the “double stroke” concept to define line pipe yielding for limiting plastic deformation of the pipeline during hydrostatic pressure testing. Practice showed that double stroke may define a nominal yield point lying between the elastic limit and the offset yield strength. Recently, a set of field hydrostatic tests were conducted on an X70 pipeline at Enterprise Products, and the test pressure at double stroke was as high as 129% of SMYS, but the von Mises stress was less than the actual yield strength. The entire pipeline was thought in the elastic conditions at double stroke during the hydrostatic testing. It is well recognized that the classical Tresca and von Mises yield criteria determines a lower and an upper bound of the limit load at yielding, and a newly proposed Zhu-Leis yield criterion determines a medium result of the two classical solutions. Extensive full-scale tests have confirmed that the Zhu-Leis yield solution is the best prediction of experimental data on average. This paper attempts to use the more accurate Zhu-Leis yield criterion to reanalyze the real-world hydrostatic tests of the X70 pipeline to see if pipe yielding occurs and to determine pipe diameter expansion at double stroke during the hydrostatic pressure testing.