Assessing the reliability of natural gas pipeline system in the presence of corrosion using fuzzy fault tree

The corrosion encountered within natural gas pipelines can precipitate significant ramifications. Numerous internal and external factors contribute to incidents of gas leakage. A multitude of factors influencing pipeline failure underscore the imperative need for a safety system intricately linked to the operation process. The absence of this systematic process for detecting factors contributing to failure detrimentally impacts the efficiency of pipelines. In this context, this paper has devised a risk assessment and warning model utilizing multi- factor monitoring data, employing the fuzzy fault tree analysis (FFTA). The fuzzy fault tree is constructed to assess the impact of individual factors and parameters influencing corrosion on the reliability of the grid. Moreover, a performance diagram illustrating this mechanism is crafted, elucidating the system's reliability relationship based on each component's reliability. The findings showed that 14 basic and 10 intermediate events play a role in the corrosion of natural gas pipelines. The failure probability of the top event was identified to be 22%. Employing the proposed method, the system's reliability was estimated with lower and upper limits of [0.6825, 0.8859]. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in addressing the uncertainty inherent in the input data.