| dc.description.abstract | Corrosion-induced damage is a major source of deterioration in infrastructure and industrial systems such as bridges, offshore and onshore structures, and underground oil and gas pipelines. The uncertainty is pervasive in the parameters affecting the evolution of corrosion process. Risk assessment and management of corroding structures requires a suitable dynamic description of the corrosion process that sufficiently accounts for the uncertainty in the initiation and growth of corrosion, and consequently propagates into the life-cycle reliability assessment of these systems. The purpose of this research is to advance the ability to provide reliable integrity management of structural systems subjected to corrosion. Specifically, we present an approach for reliability-based lifecycle management of buried pipelines, by mitigating pitting corrosion induced damage using optimization under uncertainty framework. A polynomial chaos (PC) random field is identified from the stochastic measurements of corrosion growth over time, and subsequently employed in a pipeline integrity management strategy to fulfill relevant design criteria for a prescribed probability failure. Optimal repair schedules are identified by evaluating the expected cost of operation and maintenance under different circumstances, considering the inspection intervals and the time of initial repair as design variables. The methodology presented in this study will improve the reliability and robustness of pipeline corrosion mitigation by integrating uncertainty analysis and multidisciplinary optimization, which is also applicable to other deteriorating systems. | en |
