ON THE DESIGN OF INTEGRAL BUCKLE ARRESTORS FOR OFFSHORE PIPELINES

A common method of limiting the extent of damage induced by a propagat ing buckle to a deep water pipeline is to periodically install along t he line thick rings welded between adjacent strings of the pipe (integ ral buckle arrestor). The rings locally increase the resistance to col lapse and, when properly designed, arrest an incoming buckle. The effe ctiveness of this type of local reinforcement as a buckle arrestor was studied through a series of full-scale experiments and through a nume rical model. The model was first proven to be capable of accurately si mulating the quasi-static crossing of such arrestors by a buckle and w as then used to study the arresting efficiency of this device as a fun ction of the pipe and arrestor geometric and material parameters. This paper briefly summarizes these results which are subsequently used to establish some bounds for the arrestor thickness and length and to de velop empirical design formulae for such devices. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sc ience Ltd. All rights reserved.