Fitness-for-Service Fracture Assessments of Dissimilar Pipe Girth Welds Incorporating New Crack Driving Force Solutions

The increasing demand for energy and natural resources has spurred a flurry of exploration and production activities of oil and natural gas in more hostile environments, including very deep water offshore production. Currently, structural integrity of submarine risers and flowlines conducting corrosive and aggressive hydrocarbons represents a key factor in operational safety of subsea pipelines. Advances in existing technologies favor the use of CMn steel pipelines (for example, API X65 grade steel) clad or mechanically lined with a corrosion resistant alloy (CRA), such as Alloy 625, for the transport of corrosive fluids. This work focuses on a fitness-for-service defect assessment procedure for strength mismatched welded components incorporating new crack driving force and limit load solutions. The study broadens the applicability of current evaluation procedures for J and CTOD which enter directly into structural integrity analyses and flaw tolerance criteria to provide a fairly comprehensive body of numerical solutions for crack driving forces in mismatched girth welds with circumferential surface cracks. This investigation also provides mismatch yield load solutions which are central to accurately predict failure load in strength mismatched structures subjected to large scale plasticity and ductile behavior. An approach is utilized to analyze the potential effects of the undermatching girth weld on critical flaw sizes for a typical lined pipe employed in subsea flowlines having a girth weld made of Alloy 625.