Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a probability distribution of the burst pressure of API 5L X65 pipes for the reliability assessment of corroded gas pipelines.
Methods: Corrosion is a major cause of weakening the residual strength of the pipe. The mean residual strength on the corrosion defect can be obtained using the burst pressure code. However, in order to obtain the pipe reliability, a probability distribution of the burst pressure should be provided. This study is concerned with estimating the burst pressure distribution using Monte Carlo simulation. A response surface method is employed to represent the distribution parameter as a model of the corrosion defect size.
Results: The experimental results suggest that the normal or Weibull distribution should be suitable as the probability distribution of the burst pressure. In particular, it was shown that the probability distribution parameters can be well predicted by using the depth and length of the corrosion defect.
Conclusion: Given a corrosion defect on the pipe, its corresponding burst pressure distribution can be provided at instant. Subsequently, a reliability assessment of the pipe is conducted as well.