Ratcheting, Wrinkling and Collapse of Tubes Induced by Axial Cycling Under Internal Pressure

A buried offshore pipeline is essentially axially constrained by the soil cover. Heating by the passage of hot oil at high pressure can plastically deform it. The deformation involves expansion of the diameter, which for thinner pipes can be accompanied by axisymmetric wrinkling. During a lifetime of 20 or more years, lines experience regular startup and shutdown cycles. This study examines how this cycling affects wrinkling and the hoop expansion of such lines. A set of experiments on super-duplex tubes with D/t of 28.5 was conducted using the following idealized cyclic loading history. A tube is first pressurized and then compressed into the plastic range to a level that initiates wrinkling. It is then cycled under stress control about a compressive mean stress while the pressure is kept constant. The combined loads cause simultaneous ratcheting in the hoop and axial directions as well as a gradual growth of the wrinkles. At some stage the amplitude of the wrinkles starts to grow exponentially with the number of cycles N leading to localization and collapse. The rate of ratcheting and the number of cycles to failure depend on the initial compressive pre-strain, the internal pressure and the stress cycle parameters. The problem is modeled as a shell with initial axisymmetric imperfections. A challenge in the simulations is that the cyclic plasticity model that is used must be capable of capturing correctly the type of biaxial material ratcheting that develops. The Dafalias-Popov two-surface nonlinear kinematic hardening model, enhanced and suitably calibrated is shown to capture the prevalent ratcheting deformations correctly leading to predictions that are in good agreement with the experimental results. The model is then used to evaluate the ratcheting behavior of pipes under thermal-pressure cyclic loading histories seen by buried pipelines.