Modeling Reliability for Pipeline Corrosion

This chapter describes the methodology to evaluate the reliability of corroded pipelines. The overall methodology distinguishes three main sections: the generation of new corrosion defects, the corrosion degradation process, and the reliability approach. The generation of new defects starts by identifying rates in time and after simulating their initiation time and random locations. The corrosion degradation section uses existing and generated defects to identify potential clusters or “corrosion colonies”. Each of these clusters follows a degradation process. Regarding the reliability assessment, a failure probability is evaluated following spatial and temporal analyses.