The Experience on Safety, Reliability and Risk Assessment of Some Ukrainian, Russian and Latvian Transite Pipe Lines

The advanced Expert System (ES) “InfoPipeMaster” is developed for transit pipeline management incorporating databases (DB) “Objects”, “Materials”, “Defects”, and “Loadings” with special attention to assist especially in defining the different materials damage processes during pipeline operation. Main results of ES application to the safety, reliability, and risk assessment are demonstrated for different pipelines: transit ammonia pipeline ø355.6 mm “Togliatty — Odessa” (territory of Ukraine), transit oil pipeline ø720 mm from Latvian oil corridor, transit gas pipeline ø1420 mm “Braterstvo”, transit oil pipeline ø1020 mm “Kremenchug — Kherson” and other. Comparative analysis of diagnostics is provided for each pipeline using the nondestructive testing results of different time period. Special attention is paid to the geographic navigation system, to the pipeline inspections results, to the repair and mitigation amounts, to the materials degradation in service, to the calculation modules developed for stress—strain fields as well as for the flaw risks assessment. Existing Codes of different countries and fracture mechanics methods are used for flaw assessment and remaining lifetime prediction. Categorization of flaws method is proposed with respect to the safety factor to prescribe the repair terms for different defects in order to diminish reasonably the amount of repairs and inspections. Software complex “BucklingPipeMaster” is developed to solve the physically and geometrically nonlinear problems related to the large displacements of buried transit pipelines and its application is demonstrated to estimate the stresses due to the soil movement. Risk assessment is made for different pipelines.