The effects of spatial variability of the aggressiveness of soil on system reliability of corroding underground pipelines

In this paper, a probabilistic methodology is presented for assessing the time-variant reliability of corroded underground pipelines subjected to space-variant soil aggressiveness. The Karhunen-Loève expansion is used to model the spatial variability of soil as a correlated stochastic field. The pipeline is considered as a series system for which the component and system failure probabilities are computed by Monte Carlo simulations. The probabilistic model provides a realistic time and space modelling of stochastic variations, leading to appropriate estimation of the lifetime distribution. The numerical analyses allow us to investigate the impact of various parameters on the reliability of underground pipelines, such as the soil aggressiveness, the pipe design variables, the soil correlation length and the pipeline length. The results show that neglecting the effect of spatial variability leads to pessimistic estimation of the residual lifetime and can lead to condemn prematurely the structure.