Handling Uncertainty in the Remnant Fatigue Life Assessment of Offshore Process Pipework

A typical procedure for a remnant fatigue life (RFL) assessment is stated in the BS-7910 standard. The aforementioned standard provides two different methodologies for estimating RFL; these are: the S-N curve approach and the crack growth laws (i.e. using Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) principles) approach. Due to its higher accuracy, the latter approach is more commonly used for RFL assessment in the offshore industry. Nevertheless, accurate prediction of RFL using the deterministic LEFM approach (stated in BS-7910) is a challenging task, as RFL prediction is afflicted with a high number of uncertainties. Furthermore, BS-7910 does not provide any recommendation in regard to handling the uncertainty in the deterministic RFL assessment process. The most common way of dealing with the aforementioned uncertainty is to employ Probabilistic Crack Growth (PCG) models for estimating the RFL. This manuscript explains the procedure for addressing the uncertainty in the RFL assessment of process piping with the help of a numerical example. The numerically obtained RFL estimate is used to demonstrate a calculation of inspection interval.