Reliability estimation of oil and gas pipelines with some defects

The first order and second moment reliability method for estimating reliability of the mechanical structures with some defects was concisely reviewed.This method defines that the structural reliability index is the shortest distance from the origin to the failure surface in a standard normal coordinate system. An example about reliability estimation of oil and gas pipelines with corrosion defects was given.The results show that the reliability index can be achieved by this method only being iterated for six times.Compared with the Monte-Carlo simulation method,it has a high efficiency and the accuracy of 0.01%. Furthermore,the reliability at different periods and the effective remaining life of oil and gas pipelines could also be determined with the dynamic failure model of structure.