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Submarine pipelines are the primary component of an offshore oil transportation system. Under operating conditions, a pipeline is subjected to high temperatures and pressures to improve oil mobility. As a result, additional stress accumulates in pipeline sections, which causes global buckling. For an exposed deep-water pipeline, lateral buckling is the major form of this global buckling. Large lateral displacement causes a very high bending moment which may lead to a local buckling failure in the pipe cross-section. This paper proposes a lateral global buckling failure envelope for deep-water HT/HP pipelines using a numerical simulation analysis. It analyzes the factors influencing the envelope, including the thickness t, diameter D, soil resistance coefficient μ, calculating length Lf, imperfection length L and imperfection amplitude V. Equations to calculate the failure envelope are established to make future post-buckling pipeline failure assessment more convenient. The results show that (1) the limit pressure difference pmax (the failure pressure difference for a post-buckling pipeline when it suffers no difference in temperature) is usually below the burst pressure difference pb (which is the largest pressure difference a pipeline can bear and is determined from the strength and sectional dimensions of the pipeline) and is approximately 0.62–0.75 times the value of pb and (2) thickness t has little influence on the normalized envelopes, but affects pmax. The diameter D, soil resistance coefficient μ, and calculating length Lf influence the maximum failure temperature difference Tmax (the failure temperature difference for a pipeline suffering no pressure difference). The diameter D also significantly affects the form of the normalized envelope.

Subsea pipelines are important facilities in offshore oil and gas industry to transport High-Pressure and High-Temperature (HPHT) hydrocarbon. They are often exerted by cyclic thermal loading through the whole operational life, which may trigger asymmetry in the effective axial force (EAF) profile, leading to a global axial movement, defined as ‘pipeline walking’. It may cause the downtime and structural risks, since this directional accumulation in axial movement results in the overstressing of end connection, loss of tension in a steel catenary riser (SCR) and other issues in the field, therefore subsea pipeline design requires a reliable estimate of the global pipeline walking rate. Current design methods adopt a constant soil friction coefficient and ignore variations in soil-pipeline interaction with time during the heating up and cooling down processes. In reality, the overlooked changing soil friction is important, and may alter the pipeline walking behaviours. To achieve an accurate assessment of pipeline walking, this paper advances the conventional design practice, by introducing a time-dependent axial soil friction function, to examine the pipeline walking behaviour over the operational thermal cycles. A suite of time-dependent matrixes is provided to reveal the development of the expansion/contraction of the pipeline, the corresponding mobilised soil frictions and the EAF profile. The significant nonlinear EAF profile in response to the time-dependent soil friction is examined, and is used to well assess the accumulation in pipeline walking rate. The proposed analytical framework is applied into case studies to demonstrate its validity and applicability in practice.