Development of an Experimental Programme for Industrial Approbation

This chapter describes the planning and development of an experimental programme performed by the authors, with the aim of studying the reinforcement (consolidation) effects of a given repair system using composite material wraps for damaged transmission pipelines (intended for petroleum, liquid petroleum products or natural gas), with defects of the type metal loss (also named volumetric surface defects, VSDs). Such programme could be applied to any type of advanced pipeline repair system with composite wraps in view of its qualification and industrial approbation. The results (briefly described in Sect. 2) of experimental tests executed within previous research activities together with the necessity to validate numerical methods developed for the simulation of composite repair systems have emphasized the need to define and perform a new set of tests for such repair systems. The selection of the materials (pipe steel, composite) to be tested, the testing conditions and their parameters are detailed in this chapter and the plan and objectives of such experimental programme are also explained. The results of our experimental programme will be described in Chapter “Inner Pressure Testing of Full-Scale Pipe Specimens”, while Chapter “Effectiveness Assessment of Composite Repair Systems” will present the efficiency assessment of the investigated composite repair system, performed on the base of our experimental data.