MATERIAL PROPERTY TESTING FOR FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING OF COATINGS

In 2012 and 2013 Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) performed full installation testing (bend, roller, tensioner and friction clamp) on pipes with different types of coating ranging from three layer polypropylene to thick insulation coating. The material property data as supplied by the coaters and/or the material suppliers appeared to have insufficient details for HMC to develop a model for the coated pipes. In order to obtain the missing details, HMC undertook a program of material finger printing for all coating materials used in the recent full scale testing in order to establish our own baseline for material properties. The reasons for doing so were; i) the data sheets from different suppliers of similar products were based on different test procedures and the results were not directly comparable, ii) initial testing indicated that the results quoted on the data sheets could not always be achieved by HMC and iii) the data as provided by the suppliers appeared to be not sufficient to be used for material models for finite element analysis. The focus to date has been on polyurethane based insulation materials, both for line pipe coating and for field joint coating, although the plan is to continue with polypropylene based insulation materials. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the setup of the full scale level winder and bend tests, the measurements and observations from the tests, the preliminary finite element analyses of the coating and the findings from the finger printing testing to date.