RELIABILITY-BASED TUBING AND CASING DESIGN - PRINCIPLES AND APPROACH

This paper describes the development of an LRFD format reliability-bas ed design of tubulars used in oil and gas wells. The approach is based on the principles of limit state design. The paper identifies the app licable limit states of pipe performance, discusses stochastic modelin g of the load and resistance variables, and describes calibration of t he design check equations. The calibration considers various combinati ons of hardware configurations, loadings, and tubular application zone s with their respective risk levels. Application of the design princip les is illustrated with an example problem.