Water Pipeline

Occasionally, gas distribution pipelines are laid in adjacent to water facility pipelines. Water pipelines’ leakage poses a great danger through its release of high-pressure water jets that subsequently mix with solid particles to form erosive slurries. If the pressure from the jets is directed toward the metal pipe, this highly erosive form of slurry could dramatically erode the walls of the pipe, which may lead to its point of failure.

This chapter will discuss the experimental and computational study of two piping failures involving the API 5L X42 natural gas pipes caused by high-pressure erosive slurries. An experimental study was conducted in an uniquely developed water jetting testing facility to simulate an underground natural gas pipe environment. A sandbox is used as the medium for the pipe and the sandbox is an important rig loaded with sand as the material representing the usual backfilling material for natural gas pipes. Due to the limited capability of the testing facility, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique was employed to estimate the hydrodynamic characteristics, erosion patterns and to locate the ruptured locations on the pipe in a more expanded version.