Mechanical Behaviors of Steel Strip Reinforced Flexible Pipes Under Bending

Steel strip reinforced flexible pipe (SSRFP) is a kind of unbonded composite pipe, which has more application foreground in offshore engineering due to its excellent mechanics and the considerable flexibility. In practical application, SSRFP will inevitably experience bending during reeling process and installation. In this paper, the mechanical behavior of SSRFP subjected to pure bending are studied both experimentally and numerically. A four-point bending equipment is utilized to conduct the full-scale laboratorial tests of SSRFP. Furthermore, the commercial software ABAQUS is employed to simulate its ovalization instability. The results acquired from the ABAQUS simulation are compared with the ones from verification bending experiment, which are in good coincidence with each other. The proposed model and the relative results may be of interest to the manufacture factory engineers.