Failure analysis of corroded pipelines reinforced with composite repair systems

• The focus is the rehabilitation of corroded pipelines with composite sleeves.
• A methodology to estimate the failure pressure of a reinforced pipe is presented.
• Model predictions are compared with the results of 54 different hydrostatic tests.
• There is a good agreement between model and experiments.
• The methodology is a valuable auxiliary tool for assessing the integrity of repaired pipelines.

The present paper is concerned with the analysis of corroded thin-walled metallic pipes reinforced with polymer based composite repair systems. The goal is to propose a simple methodology to predict the failure pressure of a reinforced pipeline with arbitrary geometry of the corroded region and considering any composite repair system. Hydrostatic tests performed in different laboratories were used to validate the proposed methodology, showing that a simple expression allows estimating a lower bound for the failure pressure.