Experimental and numerical investigations of external reinforced damaged pipelines

Abstract The lifetime management of different engineering structures and structural elements is one of the important technical-economic problems nowadays. The purpose of the paper is to present the role of the external reinforcing on the structural integrity of industrial and transporting steel pipelines, based on experimental and numerical investigations. External reinforcement was developed using carbon fibre polymer matrix composite (PMC). Fatigue and burst tests were performed on pipeline sections containing natural and artificial metal loss defects, and girth welds including weld defects (passed and not passed quality). Both unreinforced and reinforced pipeline sections were examined. For the FEM investigation of the problem three groups of mechanical models are applied: multilayered elastic shell, 3D elastic solid and 3D elastic-plastic solid FEM models. The aim of this numerical analysis is to clarify the deformation, stresses and strains in the surrounding area of defects both in the steel pipe and in the composite reinforcement. A further task is to determine numerically the width of the reinforcement and the number of layers needed for reinforcement or repair. The applicability of the hybrid structure (steel + PMC) was demonstrated by means of the experimental and the numerical results.