Numerical Evaluation on Improvement Performance of Waved Connection to Reduce Damage on Buried Gas Pipeline

Abstract

One of the major challenges for the oil and gas industry is to keep buried metal pipes safe from faulting. This paper discusses about a solution to keep buried pipes safe. In this study, after examining the different dimensions of the effect of wave connection on improving the performance of buried metal pipes, by changing the geometric shape of the wave connection such as doubling it, the behavior of the pipe is greatly improved. Waved connections, by their local deformation, create a rotational joint in a limited area so that other parts of the pipe remain intact. In this paper, the behavior of buried pipes due to slip direction fault displacement by modelling with Abacus software version 2017 and selection of 4-node shell element and 8-node shell element have been used for pipe and soil modelling, respectively. In this paper, by comparing to a single waved connection with a double waved connection, the performance of the pipe due to the faulting phenomenon was evaluated. The results show the improvement of the excellent performance of the double joint by reducing the plastic strain values. In addition to increasing the ductility of the pipe, the double connection has been able to reduce the strain values by about 50% compared to the single connection. In general, this paper shows that the use of wave connections can significantly increase the level of safety of buried gas pipelines without increasing the cost.