Tensile strength of the unbonded flexible pipes

Abstract

Flexible pipelines must be designed considering the extreme situation for which additional components are needed against severe loading and environmental conditions. Tensile armor is employed in case of high tensile forces, which increase with water depth; and massive components used against high internal and external pressures. In this paper, the mechanical behavior of the pipe under pure tension is investigated by both theoretical and numerical analysis, then the contribution of the external pressure to the axial problem is examined using an analytical analysis. As the deformations along the longitudinal direction of the studied pipe highly depend on the radial stiffness of the cross section, the influence of the pressure armor is carefully evaluated in the inception phase, and its radial stiffness is verified by its own numerical results. The plastic behavior for both steel and polymer layers is taken into account by using the secant modulus method. Moreover, this work answers a question raised by producers that need to know when tensile armor is required to reinforce Metallic Strip Flexible Pipes (MSFP). The theoretical model is employed to carry out the comparison between pipes with different configurations, in order to investigate the influencing parameters of the tensile stiffness. The results obtained from the theoretical and the numerical simulations lead to a remarkable confidence in the analytical solution thanks to a relatively small difference between the outcomes.