Assessment of Lateral Buckles in a HP/HT Pipeline Using Sidescan Sonar Data

Abstract

During design stage of high pressure/high temperature pipelines, some conservative parameters are adopted along with sensitivity analyses to assure safe operation in the presence of uncertainties that influence buckle formation, e.g. pipe-soil interaction, as-laid out-of-straightness and initial heat-up. After operation starts and lateral buckles appeared along the line, a survey may provide valuable information regarding confirmation of the design assumptions, evaluation of actual behaviour and the possibility of increase the operating conditions. This work presents the methodology applied to analyse the configuration of the P-53/PRA-1 12″ oil export pipeline in operation using data from a sidescan sonar survey. The aim of such analyses was to gather information for an FE model calibration as well as to obtain preliminary estimates for the bending strains at lateral buckling locations. Special attention was dedicated to smoothing and interpolation of the pipeline coordinates extracted from sonar imagery in order to avoid unrealistic strains estimates.