On the Probabilistic Distribution of External Pitting Corrosion Rate in Buried Pipelines

Author(s):  
F. Caleyo ◽  
J. C. Vela´zquez ◽  
J. M. Hallen ◽  
J. E. Araujo ◽  
E. Perez-Baruch

External pitting corrosion constitutes the degradation mechanism responsible for about 66% of the incidents reported in the last decade for oil and gas pipelines in Mexico. Thus, major efforts are underway to improve the characterization and modeling of pitting corrosion of buried pipelines. Special attention is devoted to estimate the average corrosion rate and corrosion rate variance because they are the key parameters in the estimation of the trend in pipeline reliability. This work presents the results of field and simulation studies in which soil and pipe data were gathered together with the maximum depth of external corrosion pits found at more than 250 excavation sites across southern Mexico. The distributions of parameters such as chloride, bicarbonate and sulfate levels, resistivity, pH, pipe/soil potential, humidity, redox potential, soil texture and coating type have been used to predict the distribution of pitting corrosion rate of pipelines in contact with clay, clay-loam and sandy-clay-loam soils. The time dependence of the pitting corrosion rate was fitted to a power law through a multivariate regression analysis with the maximum pit depth as the dependent variable and the pipeline age and the soil and coating properties as the independent variables. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted in which random values drawn from the distributions fitted to the field data were used to evaluate the power law model proposed for the corrosion rate. For each soil type, the distribution that best fitted the corrosion rate data was found. The results of this study will provide reliability analysts with a more accurate description of the growth rate of external corrosion pits. It is expected that this information will positively impact on integrity management plans addressing the threat posed by this damage mechanism.

Author(s):  
J. C. Vela´zquez ◽  
F. Caleyo ◽  
A. Valor ◽  
J. M. Hallen ◽  
J. H. Espina-Herna´ndez ◽  
...  

Small leaks caused by external pitting corrosion are the leading cause of failure in oil and gas pipelines in many regions of Mexico. Because of this, the need for realistic and reliable pitting corrosion growth models that are capable of accounting for the chemical and physical properties of soils and pipeline coatings is especially great. In this work, maximum pit depths and soil and coating data that were gathered at excavation sites across southern Mexico are used to investigate the impact of soil and pipe characteristics on pitting corrosion in buried pipelines. Soil field-measurements included resistivity, pH, pipe-to-soil potential, humidity, chloride, bicarbonate and sulphate levels, redox potential, soil texture and coating type. Together with the local physical chemistry of the soil and the coating characteristics, the maximum pit depth and pipeline’s age were recorded at more than 250 dig sites. The time dependence of the maximum pit depth was modeled as ymax = β(t−t0)α, with β and α being positive constants, t being the pipe’s age and t0 the pit initiation time. A multivariate regression analysis was conducted with ymax as the dependent variable, while the pipeline’ age and the soil and pipe properties were used as the independent variables. The optimal dependence of β and α on these variables was found and predictive models were proposed to describe the time dependence of the average maximum pit depth and growth rate on soil and pipe properties. Besides the creation of a generic model fitted to all the gathered data, a model was proposed for each one of the three soil types identified in this study: clay, clay-loam and sandy-clay-loam. It is shown that the application of the proposed model allows for prediction of corrosion pit growth more accurately than previous models and that this improvement positively impacts on integrity management plans that address the threat posed by external pitting corrosion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 598
Author(s):  
M. Brameld ◽  
S. Thomas ◽  
G. S. Malab

External pitting corrosion has been a long standing issue for stainless steel pressure equipment systems on Woodside offshore facilities. Experience has shown that this pitting cannot be effectively managed by inspection and, as a result, the current policy is that piping replacement should be planned once the presence of significant pitting corrosion has been identified. All Woodside offshore facilities have 316-grade stainless steel pressure equipment which is experiencing active external corrosion pitting to varying degrees. This represents the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in piping replacement across the company. STOPAQ is an established product for the mitigation of external corrosion in carbon steel equipment however, it has not previously been used at Woodside on stainless steel equipment to address pitting corrosion. Through collaboration with the Woodside Future Laboratory at Monash University, Materials and Corrosion Engineering, Woodside Energy Limited has challenged the old established theory regarding the mechanism of pitting in stainless steel and a test program has been devised to validate the new way of thinking, which postulates that elimination of moisture and oxygen from the pits, by the application of an impervious layer like STOPAQ, will stifle the corrosion reaction and arrest the pitting. A recently completed test program at Monash which utilised computed tomography (CT) scanning, to very accurately determine the volume of corrosion pits, has confirmed that the application of STOPAQ to pitted stainless steel is very effective at mitigating this type of corrosion.


Author(s):  
J. M. Race ◽  
S. J. Dawson ◽  
L. Stanley ◽  
S. Kariyawasam

One of the requirements of a comprehensive pipeline Integrity Management Plan (IMP) is the establishment of safe and cost effective re-assessment intervals for the chosen assessment method, either Direct Assessment (DA), In-Line Inspection (ILI) or hydrotesting. For pipelines where the major threat is external or internal corrosion, the determination of an appropriate re-inspection interval requires the estimation of realistic corrosion growth rates. The Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS 2005) estimate that the ability to accurately estimate corrosion rates may save pipeline companies more than $100M/year through reduced maintenance and accident avoidance costs. Unlike internal corrosion, which occurs in a closed system, the rate of the external corrosion reaction is influenced by a number of factors including the water content of the soil, the soluble salts present, the pH of the corrosion environment and the degree of oxygenation. Therefore the prediction of external rates is complex and there is currently no method for estimating corrosion rates using either empirical or mechanistic equations. This paper describes a scoring model that has been developed to estimate external corrosion growth rates for pipelines where rates cannot be estimated using more conventional methods i.e., from repeat in-line inspection data. The model considers the effect of the different variables that contribute to external corrosion and ranks them according to their effect on corrosion growth rate to produce a corrosion rate score. The resulting score is then linked to a corrosion rate database to obtain an estimated corrosion rate. The methodology has been validated by linking the calculated corrosion rate scores to known corrosion rate distributions that have been measured by comparison of the results from multiple in-line inspection runs. The paper goes on to illustrate how the estimated corrosion rates can be used for the establishment of reassessment intervals for DA, ILI and hydrotesting, comparing the benefits of this approach with current industry recommended practice and guidance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Eliceo Sosa ◽  
Adrian Verdín Martinez ◽  
Jorge L. Alamilla ◽  
Antonio Contreras ◽  
Luis M. Quej ◽  
...  

AbstractThe work introduces a numerical external damage prediction method for buried pipelines. The external pitting initiation and corrosion rate of oil or gas pipelines are affected by pipeline age, physicochemical properties of soils and cathodic protection performance as well as coating conditions. Before developing the damage prediction model, the influencing factors were weighed by grey relational analysis, and then the relationship among the pitting depth and the influencing factors of external corrosion was established for corrosion damage prediction through artificial neural network (ANN). Subsequently, the established ANN was applied to predict corrosion damage and corrosion rate for some selected cases, and the neural network prediction model was analyzed and compared to another corrosion rate prediction models. Through the analysis and comparison, a few opinions were proposed on the external corrosion damage prediction and pipeline integrity management.


2015 ◽  
Vol 789-790 ◽  
pp. 526-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Mohsin Khan ◽  
Ainul Akmar Mokhtar ◽  
Hilmi Hussin

One of the most common external corrosion failures in petroleum and power industry is due to corrosion under insulation (CUI). The difficulty in corrosion monitoring has contributed to the scarcity of corrosion rate data to be used in Risk-Based Inspection (RBI) analysis for degradation mechanism due to CUI. Limited data for CUI presented in American Petroleum Institute standard, (API 581) reflected some uncertainty for both stainless steels and carbon steels which limits the use of the data for quantitative RBI analysis. The objective of this paper is to present an adaptive neural based fuzzy model to estimate CUI corrosion rate of carbon steel based on the API data. The simulation reveals that the model successfully predict the corrosion rates against the values given by API 581 with a mean absolute deviation ( MAD ) value of 0.0005, within that the model is also providing its outcomes for those values even for which API 581 has not given its results. The results from this model would provide the engineers to do necessary inferences in a more quantitative approach.


Metals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanme Yoon ◽  
Heon-Young Ha ◽  
Tae-Ho Lee ◽  
Sung-Dae Kim ◽  
Jae Hoon Jang ◽  
...  

The effects of C-substitution for part of the N content, on the pitting corrosion resistance and repassivation tendencies of duplex stainless steels (DSSs) were investigated. For this investigation, normal UNS S32205 containing N only (DSS-N) and the C-substituted DSS (DSS-NC) were fabricated. Microstructural analyses confirmed that the two DSSs had dual-phase microstructures without precipitates, and they possessed similar initial microstructure, including their grain sizes and phase fractions. Polarization and immersion tests performed in concentrated chloride solutions revealed that the DSS-NC was more resistant against stable pitting corrosion and possessed a higher repassivation tendency than the DSS-N. Furthermore, the corrosion pits initiated and propagated to a less corrosion resistant α phase. Polarization tests and corrosion depth measurements conducted in an HCl solution indicated that the DSS-NC exhibited lower galvanic corrosion rate between the α and γ phases than the DSS-N. Therefore, the growth rate of pit embryo was lowered in the DSS-NC, which shifted the potentials for the stable pit initiation and the pit extinction to the higher values.


2011 ◽  
Vol 255-260 ◽  
pp. 514-518
Author(s):  
Zheng Yi Kong ◽  
Shan Hua Xu ◽  
Yu Sheng Chen

Because of the complexity of corrosion, the law of uniform corrosion and localized corrosion is still not clear,so it is difficult to assess their impact on the structure safety. In order to differ them and find their own law, we obtain a lot of corrosion specimens by ways of constant temperature and humidity, and then detect the size of corrosion pits by roughness tester. After that, the method for calculating the thickness of uniform corrosion and localized corrosion is proposed. Then the method is used to analyze the experiment data. The result indicates the thickness of uniform corrosion and localized corrosion all increase with the rate of corrosion, and they all show a power relationship with corrosion rate, so it will provide a basis for distinguishing them in safety assessment.


Author(s):  
Tatsuro Nakai ◽  
Hisao Matsushita ◽  
Norio Yamamoto

The objective of this study is to obtain basic data for discussing the structural integrity of aged ships, especially hold frames of aged bulk carriers. Firstly, shapes of corrosion pits observed on hold frames of bulk carriers have been investigated. It was shown that the shape of the corrosion pits is a circular cone and the ratio of the diameter to the depth is in the range between 8 to 1 and 10 to 1. Secondly, a series of tensile tests has been conducted to investigate the effect of pitting corrosion on tensile strength. It was pointed out that the tensile strength decreases gradually and the total elongation decreases drastically with the increase of thickness loss due to pitting corrosion. Thirdly, a series of 4-point bend tests with structural models which consist of shell, web and face plates simulating hold frames of bulk carriers has been carried out to investigate the effect of pitting corrosion on collapse behavior and lateral-distortional buckling behavior. Following the experiment, a series of non-linear FE-analyses has been also made. In the case where tensile load acted on the face plate, cracks were initiated at the bottom of the pits when pitting concentrated on the web near the face plate. On the other hand in the case where compression load acted on the face plate, lateral-distortional buckling has been observed and the ultimate load of the structural models where pitting developed regularly on the web was found to be almost the same as that of the structural models where the web has uniform corrosion corresponding to the average thickness loss.


Author(s):  
Tatsuro Nakai ◽  
Hisao Matsushita ◽  
Norio Yamamoto

Corrosion pits with a conical shape are typically observed in hold frames in way of cargo holds of bulk carriers which carry coal and iron ore. The ratio of the diameter to the depth of the typical corrosion pits is in the range between 8–1 and 10–1 and its diameter might become up to 50mm. The evaluation of residual strength of members with large uneven pitting corrosion is difficult compared with that of members with general corrosion. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to develop a method for the evaluation of residual strength of pitted members. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of pitting corrosion on the ultimate strength of steel plates under various loading conditions and explore a method for the evaluation of residual thickness of pitted plates. In the present study, a series of non-linear FE-analyses has been conducted with steel plates with a variety of random pit distributions under various loading conditions such as uni-axial compression, bi-axial compression, shear and combination of these. In these analyses, random pit distributions were calculated by the previously developed corrosion model. It has been shown that equivalent thickness loss, which is defined as thickness loss of uniformly corroded plates with the same ultimate strength as the randomly pitted plates, is smaller than or equal to 1.25 times the average thickness loss. It has been also revealed that the equivalent thickness loss for the ultimate strength under the above-mentioned loading conditions is smaller than average thickness loss at the minimum cross section, where the average thickness loss at the minimum cross section almost corresponds to the equivalent thickness loss for the tensile strength. Based on these findings, a method for the estimation of equivalent thickness loss of pitted plates has been discussed using the thickness diminution-DOP relationship, where DOP (Degree of Pitting Intensity) is defined as the ratio of the pitted surface area to the total surface area.


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