Deepwater Flexible Risers and Pipelines

Yong Bai

• Publisher: Wiley-Scrivener
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119322726
• eBook ISBN: 9781119322733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy

The technology, processes, materials, and theories surrounding pipeline construction, application, and troubleshooting are constantly changing, and this new series, Advances in Pipes and Pipelines, has been created to meet the needs of engineers and scientists to keep them up to date and informed of all of these advances. This second volume in the series focuses on flexible pipelines, risers, and umbilicals, offering the engineer the most thorough coverage of the state-of-the-art available. The authors of this work have written numerous books and papers on these subjects and are some of the most influential authors on flexible pipes in the world, contributing much of the literature on this subject to the industry. This new volume is a presentation of some of the most cutting-edge technological advances in technical publishing.

The first volume in this series, published by Wiley-Scrivener, is Flexible Pipes, available at www.wiley.com. Laying the foundation for the series, it is a groundbreaking work, written by some of the world's foremost authorities on pipes and pipelines. Continuing in this series, the editors have compiled the second volume, equally as groundbreaking, expanding the scope to pipelines, risers, and umbilicals.

This is the most comprehensive and in-depth series on pipelines, covering not just the various materials and their aspects that make them different, but every process that goes into their installation, operation, and design. This is the future of pipelines, and it is an important breakthrough. A must-have for the veteran engineer and student alike, this volume is an important new advancement in the energy industry, a strong link in the chain of the world's energy production.

Part 1
LOCAL ANALYSIS

1
Introduction

1.1 Flexible Pipelines Overview

The oil and gas industry proclaims pipelines as the most economical device of large scale overland conveyance for crude oil and natural gas, compared to truck and rail transportation. These can continuously carry large quantities of fluids and they are considered by far to be the most reliable. The rapid development of the petroleum industry leads to high financial investments in engineering research, which has quickly conducted to achievement of remarkable effects, so that recently steel homogeneous pipes have been replaced by flexible pipelines, widely used by oil and gas industry for both onshore and offshore purposes. Mostly, they are employed offshore as transportation of well products such as oil, gas, and condensate, well control lines, injection of water and gases, and export of processed product, but also as flowlines connecting subsea wells, well-head platforms, templates or loading terminals, processing platforms, and jumper lines connecting fixed platforms to support vessels.

Flexible pipelines are relatively new kinds of profiles which have developed since the late 1970s; initially, they were used in few offshore areas until being employed in many projects, thanks to the applicability in water depths up to 8,000 ft, pressures up to 10,000 psi, and high temperatures up to 150°, beside the high adaptability to different environmental conditions and large vessels motion [1].

Nowadays, even if many researchers are employed to enhance knowledge about flexible pipelines, there are no books available that systematically introduce the design procedures and analysis criteria that are always valid for the wide spectrum of these structures. On the other hand, it is possible to find many reference sources which can streamline the issues.

Moreover, they are widely used also because of their easy and cheap transport and installation, due to the possibility of being prefabricated onshore in long lengths and stored in limited size on reels; in fact, as most relevant structural property, these pipes show very low bending stiffness in comparison to axial tensile stiffness. Besides, the economic benefits, they are considered to be technically proficient due to their easy and fast laying procedure, durability, and recoverability. In the light of the above, the petroleum industry turns into flexible structures, allowing for permanent connection between the subsea system and any facility at the water surface with large motions.

Being flexible pipes, crucial elements for the right operational oil and gas spill in terms of both performance and pollution, at the same time, a deep finite element model (FEM) is highly recommended in order to verify the reliability of the design. This method called DTA (Design Through Analysis) involves both the abovementioned procedures and the two-step process is used in complementary way in order to reach less conservative outcomes in designing, thus minimizing the project CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) and OPEX (Operating Expenditure). In some cases, it shows that codes and regulations are over conservative, and the real behavior can be captured through a FE simulation when the input parameters are well defined, if not data are statistically modeled in order to produce a reliable distribution for a range of loads and effects.

1.2 Environmental Conditions

The wide expansion of these structures during the last decades has been made possible thanks to the costs-design optimization. It considers a deep understanding of the environmental conditions in which the pipeline will be installed and operated. Some of the drivers are: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• About the Author
• Part 1: LOCAL ANALYSIS
• Part 2: RISER ENGINEERING
• Part 3: FIBER GLASS REINFORCED DEEP WATER RISERS
• Part 4: ANCILLARY EQUIPMENTS FOR FLEXIBLES AND UMBILICALS
• Index
• Also of Interest
• End User License Agreement