In the design of pipelines, the currently used methods do not provide for a realistic assessment of either the actual safety of a structure or the reliability of the pipe response under an assumed service loading. This may be largely attributable to t...
In the design of pipelines, the currently used methods do not provide for a realistic assessment of either the actual safety of a structure or the reliability of the pipe response under an assumed service loading. This may be largely attributable to the inadequate definition of the supporting strength of a pipeline and to a lack of knowledge of the exact nature of the the loading on the system. In this study, probability theory was employed as a comparative tool relating the safety implications of the current design method to past experience. In order to calibrate the current design method with the limit state design procedure, the probabilities of failure and partial safety factors for design parameters were computed by using computer, in accordance with the Level Ⅱ method of reliability theory. The computed results showed that the design results based on the current proceduresfor the pipeline design have a probability of failure of about 2.5%, according to the limit state principles and when tighter supervision is exerted reliability of the pipelines can be increased greatly without changes in safety factors ; reliability of 99.95% can be achieved by reducing the coefficient of variation of 10% in the bedding factor.