On elastic-plastic collapse of subsea pipelines under external hydrostatic pressure and denting force

• Analytical analysis is presented for corroded pipes under external pressure.
• Plasticity effect is not ignorable when pipe is thick enough.
• Buckle propagation pressure serves as a meaningful value to normalize the pressure for large deflection analysis.

This paper presents analytical and numerical researches on the buckling or collapse of offshore pipelines under external hydrostatic pressure. Firstly the case of homogeneous ring model is investigated followed by a detailed study on corroded rings. The elastic-plastic collapse pressure could be treated as the least root of an elementary function. We prove that collapse pressure is a strictly increasing function of mode number in this paper and present some interesting structures of the roots. Partially corroded ring is parametrized by corrosion depth and angle extent. A comprehensive comparison shows that plasticity should not be neglected when the ring is thick-walled. Moreover, a study on large deflection deformation of 3D cylindrical shells quasi-statically dented under constant external pressure is carried out theoretically and numerically. The buckle propagation pressure is shown to be a meaningful value to normalize external pressure. This paper serves to enhance the understanding of destabilizing effect of external pressure mainly applicable and relevant to subsea offshore industry.