New procedure of automatic modeling of pipelines with realistic shaped corrosion defects

[Display omitted] •Development of new procedure to model complex shaped corrosion defects in pipelines using finite elements.•Failure analysis of corroded pipelines using?nite element method subjected to internal pressure.•Validation of new procedure against experimental results. Corrosion is still one of the most important causes of structural failure of and incidents in pipelines. Up until now, most finite element studies have considered modelling corrosion defects as a single or multiple idealized defects and their interactions. This paper presents an original methodology that has been developed for the automatic modeling of the complex geometry needed to represent real corrosion defects, using data obtained by field inspection, and also for building an appropriate finite element mesh for these defects. This new methodology enables a more in-depth finite element analysis and uses information already available from data obtained in inspections, which are currently only used to create clusters of idealized defects. The methodology enables the structural assessment of corroded pipelines to be further improved, giving more headroom to explore pipelines affected by corrosion. The methodology was validated by non-linear failure analysis, which were compared against semi-empirical methods and experimental results. The results are very promising and the computation efficiency is attractive.