Reliability Analysis of Buried Pipes with Corrosion and Seismic Impact

This paper presents structural reliability assessment of adverse effects of corrosion on buried steel pipe under seismic impact. The modelling of corrosion and the outcome of an earthquake such as permanent ground deformation are difficult to analyse due to lack of information and the randomness associated with some of the parameters. Therefore, a computational framework for implementing a time-variant advanced Monte Carlo simulation approach is developed for reliability estimation. The approach involves a combination of Line Sampling (LS) and Important Sampling (IS). The result shows that the impact of corrosion alongside with the seismic effects could be very destructive on buried pipelines if the proper analysis is not performed at the design stage. The outcomes based on the combined approach demonstrate good agreement but with better computational efficiency with other methods such as Monte Carlo (MC), IS, and LS, separately.