Development of an Ansys interface for FE solid modeling and analysis of corroded pipelines

The assessment of the structural integrity of corroded pipes has become of main interest to help engineers to take the important decision of maintaining or repairing a pipeline. Solid finite element (FE) models have been widely used to perform failure analyses but the generation of the required models is, in many cases, a hard task to do. In this work, we present the PIPE program that provides an Ansys Interface to automatically generate solid models and to manage the FE analyses of pipes with multiple rectangular defects in arbitrary position. The code is totally developed within the general-purpose program Ansys and the whole process is guided by a friendly interface. A validation test comparing the experimental to the numerical results is presented.