On the arresting performance of welded-ring buckle arrestor for subsea pipelines

ABSTRACT

Welded-ring buckle arrestor is a stiff ring slipped over and welded to a pipe. In this paper, the small-scale experiments on SS304 pipes with welded-ring arrestors were performed in a sealed hyperbaric chamber. A numerical framework was also established to reproduce the process of a welded-ring arrestor crossed by a propagating buckle under external pressure, and good consistency was observed between the experimental and numerical results. The crossover pressure was then investigated parametrically covering the weld size, primary geometric characteristics, as well as material properties. An empirical expression was established to evaluate the crossover pressure of welded-ring arrestors. With the proposed empirical expression and lower bound envelope line, the arresting efficiencies of welded-ring arrestors can be reasonably estimated for the preliminary design. Also, the comparison with integral arrestors indicates that welded-ring arrestors can achieve a similar arresting efficiency in certain cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Offshore pipelines
• welded-ring arrestor
• arresting efficiency
• buckling propagation
• external pressure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shunfeng Gong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4184-9639

Xipeng Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4505-8068

Lin Yuan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0652-0878

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 51779223, 51479176, 51009122].