Design of offshore pipelines under thermal expansion

• Grant number: 19/18701-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2019
• End date: September 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Mechanical Engineering - Mechanics of Solids
• Principal Investigator: Renato Picelli Sanches
• Grantee: Filipe Fonseca da Guia
• Host Institution: Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 18/05797-8 - Addressing design challenges of offshore structures via Multiphysics topology optimization, AP.JP

Abstract

For the deep-water development of oil and gas production, it is well recognized that the effect of severe environmental conditions, i.e., high pressure and high temperature (HPHT), has caused various difficulties. In HPHT conditions, thermal expansion naturally occurs in structures such as pipelines, subsea systems, and topside facilities. To overcome HPHT-related problems of subsea pipelines, i.e., thermal expansion and global and local buckling, engineers must consider the amount of thermal expansion that may take place. This research will start reviewing the available methods for generating reliable pipe expansion designs. A pipeline expansion example will be studied with the assumption of free expansion with uniform temperature. This means that we assumed zero restraining forces at the pipe end, but soil friction along the pipe. The pipeline will be simulated using the finite element method (FEM) using ANSYS and compared with an in-house code written in MATLAB. The in-house code also contains the Topology Optimization of Binary Structures (TOBS) implementation that will be used to run a simplified optimization case of the subsea pipeline.