Statistical Approach of Stress Concentration Factor (SCF) Within Pipeline Girth Welds

Engineering design must take care of local peaks within stress field, in order to provide relevant forecast of material behavior. Within pipeline girth welds, pipe misalignment is an ordinary cause of significant stress concentrations. The matching of pipe ends depends of the quality of alignment procedure but it is also much influenced by pipe fabrication tolerances. In general, misalignment is estimated considering the maximal and minimal values of each pipe size according to pipe fabrication tolerances. But, in practice, the probability to get a such case is very low. This paper describes how to improve the calculation of stress concentration factor (SCF) through a statistical analysis of pipe dimensions. The use of actual pipe measurements is not necessary even if it provides better SCF estimation. Indeed the distribution of pipe size can be estimated through the fabrication tolerances which require acceptable capacities of the manufacturing system.