There is consensus on the need for in-service buckling analyses to assess the integrity of both flowlines and long distance trunklines subject to HT/HT service condition. The extent of the analyses and supporting survey depends on the severity of the application.
Several efforts have been dedicated to develop design methods and procedure suitable for operating pipeline safely as well as protecting population, environmental resource and assets. At the beginning, there was a gap to be closed as specific mitigation measures were never designed. Nowadays, thanks to computational progress, it seems that the attention is addressed to face the uncertainties affecting the subject matter but, sometime, leading to overdesign.
The scope of the paper is to present aspects of global buckling design analyses that were performed in recent projects with the aim to highlight the challenges and the risks, the accuracy or the limitation of the methods, the feedback and the lesson learnt of real installed pipelines under operating conditions.
