Project Summary
Inability to provide service at expected or designed levels after disasters is a serious problem for buried pipelines systems in Turkey as well as in the world. During the service life of pipeline, as soon as the demand by the loading exceeds the capacity of the pipeline, damage occurs and the material (petroleum, gas, water, etc.) carried by the pipelines leaks. Depending on the number and type of damages pipeline systems may not convey the material they are carrying as designed and the performance level decreases. Because of the extensive damage occurred after some major earthquakes, it was observed that the performance levels of the pipeline systems dropped to zero and months, even years were required to bring the performance levels to the original state. All these observations show the need for performance based design and assessment for pipelines. Performance based design is accepted widely and used in building engineering whereas only limited applications are available for pipelines. As a response to those needs, this project aims to perform robustness and reliability analysis of pipelines at element and system level. Only earthquakes and landslides will be taken into account as disasters in this project. The work will be under two main headings: element and system analysis. Pipeline damage relationships will be investigated during the element based work. Previous relationships will be evaluated and improved using the most recent data from earthquakes and new approaches like cluster analysis applications. As part of the system based work, performance criteria will be developed at international standarts and the design and assessment indicators will be obtained. Pipeline connections and hydraulic analysis will be considered in the system based part of the research. Because of the uncertainities in loading and capacities during the service life of the pipelines, probabilistic approach and statistics will be applied in robustness and reliability assessments. In addition, finite elements and Monte Carlo simulations will be utilized in both element and system based parts. During the all stages of researchin this work, data from recent earthquakes, especially from New Zealand, will be used. The products of this research will be adapted to geographical information systems (GIS) in order to carry the results of successfully completed previous TÜBİTAK project one step further and exploit the applications.
