Response of Corroded Steel Pipeline Without and with CFRP Reinforcement to Reverse Fault Movement

Abstract

Corroded steel pipelines are particularly vulnerable to failure due to ground movement, which highlights the need to improve their seismic resistance through reinforcement methods. This paper establishes a three-dimensional finite element model of a corroded steel pipeline subjected to a reverse fault, which considers the effects of the corrosion position and depth, winding thickness, and length of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP), to investigate the stress, strain, elliptic deformation, and failure modes of the pipeline before and after CFRP reinforcement. Results indicate that the main failure mode of the intact and corroded pipeline crossing the reverse fault is local buckling. Corrosion intensifies the response of the cross-fault pipeline, accelerates its failure occurrence, and promotes transformation from a single failure mode to multiple failure modes. For CFRP reinforcement, an increase in CFRP winding thickness can effectively inhibit the growth of the pipeline’s compressive strain, thus reducing the buckling potential. Each additional CFRP layer can further enhance the overall buckling resistance but at a decreasing rate. Similarly, longer CFRP winding improves buckling resistance though the effectiveness per meter decreases. Therefore, it is recommended that the thickness and length of CFRP winding on the pipeline should be optimized to obtain the best reinforcement at a reasonable cost.