Author(s)

A. U. Ebenuwa, K. F. Tee, Y. Zhang

Abstract

This paper presents the study of the negative effects of corrosion on the robustness of buried pipeline based on deflection and bending strain failure modes. The fuzzy variable is used in the assessment to take into account the subjective character of the corrosion-induced failure. The approach gains its efficiency by scrutinizing the structural robustness at every membership level with respect to various degrees of imprecision. It is shown that the use of alpha-level discretization in the assessment of an entropy based robustness measure could produce credible results with better understanding of uncertainties associated with the failure of buried pipelines.

Keywords

robustness assessment, entropy measure, alpha-level discretization, failure modes, buried pipes, fuzzy