A further form of distributed buoyancy is used for buckle mitigation purposes.
If a pipeline is carrying high temperature product it is inevitable that expansion will occur along the steel pipe. Longitudinal expansion can turn into a buckling situation with catastrophic results.
To mitigate this phenomenon designers incorporate pre-determined buoyant zones along the pipeline to control such occurrences.
In a typical 25 year design life, buckle mitigation modules may travel over 15km of seabed and, for this reason, the external coating must be highly abrasion resistant. Balmoral’s finishing materials are ideally suited to this purpose.
