BENDING MOMENT CAPACITY OF PIPES

Sren Hauch and Yong Bai

American Bureau of Shipping Offshore Technology Department Houston, Texas USA In most modern pipeline design, the required minimum wall thickness is determined based on a maximum allowable hoop stress under design pressure. This is an efficient way to come up with an initial wall thickness design, based on the assumption that pressure will be the governing load. However, a pipeline may be subjected to additional loads due to installation, seabed contours, impacts and high-pressure/high-temperature operating conditions for which the bending moment capacity is often the limiting parameter. If in-place analyses for the optimal route predict that the maximum allowable moment to a pipeline is going to be exceeded, it will be necessary to either increase the wall thickness or, more conventionally, to perform seabed intervention to reduce the bending of the pipe.