On the failure pressure of pipelines containing wall reduction and isolated pit corrosion defects

•Semi-empirical methods for pipelines failure pressure estimation were investigated.•Shell finite element models were employed to assess the results.•Guidelines for employing the semi-empirical methods studied were established.•Pit corrosion in pipelines was analyzed using finite element analysis.•An analytical procedure for failure pressure estimation of pit corrosion in pipelines has been derived from numerical results. Corrosion defects which occur in oil and gas pipelines may compromise the safety of such structures. This paper makes an assessment of the accuracy of some of the analytical procedures commonly employed by industry to calculate the failure pressure of corroded pipelines via finite element analyses (FEA). Second, this paper studies the stress distribution on isolated pit corrosion defects also via FEA. Analytical procedures to calculate the failure pressure associated to isolated pits are not available yet. Thus, based on the stress analysis results, such a procedure is devised and proposed here.