Carbon capture depends on pipelines that carry CO₂ across the seabed to offshore storage sites, where years of immersion slowly thin their steel walls.
This study models 33 corroded pipe configurations under combined internal pressure and bending, establishing which flaws genuinely threaten a pipeline and which can be safely tolerated.
Key points:
- Across corrosion depths from 10% to 80% of the wall, depth proved the dominant factor, with the thinned section losing stiffness and buckling locally before the rest of the pipe gives way
- Internal pressure hurts rather than helps, with normalised bending capacity falling from 0.95 to 0.86 as pressure rises from 0 to 20 MPa, since hoop stress combines with bending stress to trigger earlier yielding at the flaw
- Defect length matters only up to a point, because collapse is governed by the weakest cross-section and stretching a flaw further along the pipe barely changes the outcome
This article was published in the WSSET affiliate journal, Future Cities and Environment. For more information on our affiliate journals visit: wsset.org/journals
Read the full paper here: https://cspub-fce-submission.org/index.php/fce/article/view/374