A Method on Estimates of Stress Intensity Factors of Outer Circle and Inner Ellipse Submarine Pipeline Under Bending Moment

The slender circle submarine pipeline possesses both shell and beam characteristics, which are widely used in practical engineering. Unfortunately, for some reason, there will be some geometric defects in the cross-section of the pipeline (such as machining errors and seawater corrosion, etc.), resulting in the stiffness of the circular submarine pipeline being different. The cracked variable stiffness pipeline is actually a typical three-dimensional complex crack problem. In this paper, taking the outer circle and inner ellipse submarine pipeline as an example, a method based on elementary mechanics and the concept of the conservation law is proposed to determine the stress intensity factors (SIFs) of variable stiffness pipeline, and a series of closed-form expressions of SIF are derived for the cracked pipeline. The results from the present method are shown to agree well with available solutions and FEM. In particular, the present method can also be easily applied to other similar variable stiffness submarine pipelines.

Automated summary

This paper presents a method based on elementary mechanics and the concept of the conservation law to determine the stress intensity factors (SIFs) of variable stiffness submarine pipelines, using the example of the outer circle and inner ellipse submarine pipeline. Closed-form expressions of SIF for the cracked pipeline are derived. The results are shown to be in good agreement with available solutions and finite element method (FEM), and the method can also be easily applied to other similar variable stiffness submarine pipelines.