Ductile Failure and Safety Optimization of Gas Pipeline

Safety and failure in gas pipelines are very important in gas and petroleum industry. For this reason, it is important to study the effect of different parameters in order to reach the maximum safety in design and application. In this paper, a three dimensional finite element analysis is carried out to study the effect of crack length, crack depth, crack position, internal pressure and pipe thickness on failure mode and safety of API X65 gas pipe. Four levels are considered for each parameter and finite element simulations are carried out by using design of experiments (DOE). Then, multi-objective Taguchi method is conducted in order to minimize x and y coordinates of Failure Assessment Diagram (FAD). So, desired levels that minimize the coordinates and rises the possibility of safety are derived for each parameter. The variation in FAD coordinates according to the changes in each parameter are also found. Finally, comparisons between the optimum design and all other experiments and simulations have shown a good safety situation. It is also concluded that the more design parameters close to optimum levels, the better safety condition will occur in FAD. A verification study is performed on the safety of longitudinal semi-elliptical crack and the results has shown a good agreement between numerical and experimental results.