Comprehensive evaluation of loess collapsibility of oil and gas pipeline based on cloud theory

Sci Rep. 2021 Jul 29;11(1):15422. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94882-2.

Abstract

The comprehensive evaluation of pipeline loess collapsibility risk is a necessary means to control the safety risks of pipelines in the collapsible loess section. It is also one of the critical scientific bases for risk prevention, control, and management. The comprehensive evaluation system of cloud theory consists of quantitative and qualitative indexes, and the evaluation system has the characteristics of randomness and fuzziness. In view of this problem, the standard qualitative and semi-quantitative evaluation methods have intense subjectivity in dealing with the uncertainty problems such as randomness and fuzziness of the system, the cloud theory, which can effectively reflect the randomness and fuzziness of things at the same time, is introduced. The state scale cloud and index importance weight cloud of pipeline loess collapse risk are constructed by the golden section method. The uncertainty cloud reasoning process of the quantitative indexes and the expert scoring method of the qualitative indexes are proposed. The comprehensive evaluation model of loess collapsibility risk of oil and gas pipeline is established, and the engineering example is analyzed. The complete evaluation results of 10 samples to be evaluated are consistent with the results of the semi-quantitative method and are compatible with the actual situation. The evaluation process softens the subjective division of index boundary, simplifies the preprocessing of index data, realizes the organic integration of quantitative and qualitative decisions, and improves the accuracy, rationality, and visualization of the results.