Faster Rstreng: A More Efficient Effective Area Method Algorithm For Corrosion Assessment

Corrosion is one of the major threats to the safety and structural integrity of oil and gas transmission pipelines. The corrosion threat is usually managed by regular in-line inspection (ILI). The effective area method (RSTRENG) is the most popular corrosion assessment model to convert the measured corrosion size to predicted burst pressure. Given a detailed corrosion measurement profile, the effective area method involves an iterative process to find the minimum burst pressure. As stated in ASME B31G, “for a corroded profile defined by n measurements of depth of corrosion including the end points at nominally full wall thickness, n!/2(n - 2)! iterations are required to examine all possible combinations of local metal loss with respect to surrounding remaining material”, the widely used effective area algorithm has at least an order of n-square time complexity (O(n2)). As n increases, the computation time increases nonlinearly. This paper reviewed the traditional RSTRENG algorithm first, and demonstrated that it is not necessary to always loop through all the combinations and check the corresponding burst pressure one by one. Because some combinations with shallower and shorter corrosion size are certainly not the final critical combination corresponding to the minimum burst pressure. A more efficient algorithm (Faster RSTRENG) is proposed and presented in this paper, which can reduce the algorithm computation time significantly.