Publications Details

UTILIZING PROBABILISTIC ANALYSES TO EXPLORE PERFORMANCE MARGINS OF NATURAL GAS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE TRANSPORT AND DELIVERY OF HYDROGEN AND HYDROGEN BLENDS

Schroeder, Benjamin B.; San Marchi, Chris; Ronevich, Joseph; Duell, Joshua; Potts, Steve

Gaseous hydrogen is known to embrittle most steels, including the steels used in natural gas pipelines. As injection of hydrogen into the existing natural gas infrastructure is considered globally by the pipeline industry, the structural integrity of pipelines transporting gaseous hydrogen must be investigated. Hydrogen Extremely Low Probability of Rupture (HELPR) is a publicly available and open-source probabilistic fatigue and fracture mechanics toolkit recently developed at Sandia National Laboratories. HELPR is intended to incorporate the influence of hydrogen into structural integrity assessments of natural gas transmission and distribution infrastructure. HELPR utilizes engineering models, such as those specified in ASME B31.12 and API 579, with relatively low computational costs to perform large sample ensembles, enabling estimation of performance distributions including low probability tail estimates. Leveraging the probabilistic capabilities built into HELPR, the sensitivity of fatigue and fracture calculations to specific modeling parameters on performance margins can be quantified. Through applying HELPR’s probabilistic capabilities to realistic scenarios, the impact of uncertainty in specific model parameter descriptions on performance margins, such as cycles to unstable crack growth or rupture in gaseous hydrogen, can be characterized; this same approach can then be used to assess the impact of reducing uncertainty sources on the resulting performance metrics, margins, and associated risks. A few industry-motivated scenarios are used to demonstrate this approach.