Study on lateral buckling characteristics of a submarine pipeline with a single arch symmetric initial imperfection

With the development of submarine oil and gas resources, research on global pipeline buckling caused by high temperature and pressure in the process of oil and gas transport is becoming an important issue. Owing to human factors or to uneven seabed conditions, local bends are produced in the process of pipeline manufacturing and laying. Those bends are called geometric initial imperfections whose deformation forms can be divided into a single arch symmetric deformation and a double arch antisymmetric deformation. In this paper, the energy method is introduced to calculate the analytical solution of pipeline lateral buckling with a single arch initial imperfection, and the cause of snap buckling phenomenon is discussed. A FEA model is established, and the difference between the analytical solution and numerical solution is also presented.