Study On Lateral Global Buckling Numerical Simulation Of Subsea Pipelines

In recent years, pipeline is widely used in the transport of oil and gas in theglobal with the development of the offshore engineering. The oil and gas throughthe pipeline need to achieve high temperature and high pressure (HP-HT) in order toprevent the paraffin from plugging the pipeline. Otherwise, the pipeline bucklingand breaking will cause serious environmental pollution and economic losses. Atpresent, a lot of offshore pipeline can’t be directly observed in reason that they are ondeep seabed. Therefore, it has important theoretical significance and practical valueto establish a set of perfect numerical simulation method.In this paper, firstly, numerical simulation methods of subsea pipeline globalbuckling were described by using ABAQUS software. This paper also presents anovel method to introduce the initial imperfection of the pipeline into the FE model inthe global buckling analysis innovatively. It summarized four typical finite elementanalysis (FEA) methods. The analyzing results from the four typical FEA were thencompared with analytical solutions. Secondly, this paper analyses the influencingfactors in global buckling through a case of engineering while the rule of each factor’sparameters selection are analyzed in its reasonable value through the finite elementcalculation. At last, three questions of numerical simulation of seabed pipelineglobal buckling were discussed separately.Studies show that it has significant differences between different simulationmethods of pipeline buckling analysis. The reason is3D analysis model consideringthe process of pipeline embedding in seabed and the effect of pipeline deformationvelocity. Submarine pipeline global buckling is affected by many factors; somefactors are significant such as temperature load, diameter of pipeline, wall thicknessof pipeline and so on. The model boundary selection with strong ties to thecalculation length will change along with the calculation length. The velocity ofsubmarine pipeline buckling translation has a significant impact to global buckling.The different translation velocity corresponding to different horizontal resistance andthe larger velocity translation the more influence to global buckling is.