Stochastic seismic response of pipelines with corrosion

For aging pipelines, corrosion gradually appears inside and outside during in-service time. However, because the uncertainty characteristics of the soil around the pipeline and conveying material in the pipeline, the generation and development processes of the pipeline corrosion would be stochastic processes. This background must be taken into account in the seismic response analysis of the pipeline. In this article, using Markov chain with absorbing barrier, a model simulating the evolution of the pipeline corrosion is presented. This model divides a pipeline into several segments and obtains the distribution probabilities of the cross section areas of the segments. Elastic foundation beam method and random perturbation method are used to obtain the seismic response of the pipeline with corrosion. To validate the proposed method, two pipelines are investigated in detail. The mean and standard deviation of the displacements and stress of the pipeline under earthquake are evaluated by the proposed method. Also, the results of one pipeline are compared with Monte Carlo random simulation. The numerical results show that the proposed model can reasonably predict the seismic response of the pipeline with corrosion.