Buckling and Post-Buckling of Energy Pipelines

Due to increasing demands on energy sources, the exploration and development of new hydrocarbon resources has been pushed to fron­tier regions and harsh environments, such as arctic permafrost terrains and offshore ice environments. Pipelines buried in such cold regions are subjected to large loadings which could result in pipeline being subjected to significant magnitudes of stresses and strains, in some cases beyond the original design limit. Due to these combinations loading, pipelines may experience localized deformation, known as local buckling, pushing the material's response well into its plasticity range. In the research reported herein, the parameters that may influence the local buckling behavior of energy pipelines are first introduced. Then, a comprehensive computational parametric study is conducted in order to investigate the effect of these parameters on the local buckling and post buckling behavior of pipes. The commer­cial finite element software package ABAQUS/Standard (version 6.6), was used for that purpose. The numerical modelling procedures were calibrated using the data found in relevant works presented in literature.