Pingyuan Xia

This Communication reports limited engineering screening data on polymer liner candidates for flexible composite pipes used in oil and gas service. Three exposure conditions were considered: hydrothermal aging in superheated water, thermal-oxidative aging in dry air, and hydrocarbon-medium exposure. Superheated-water immersion for up to 1000 h, dry-air aging for 168 h, and 7-day hydrocarbon exposure were used to describe changes in tensile properties, Shore hardness, mass, and thickness. Complete replicate records were available only for the thermal-oxidative aging dataset; therefore, most hydrothermal and hydrocarbon-medium results are reported as descriptive summary data. In the recorded data, EPDM formulation CL-2-1 retained approximately 89% of its tensile strength after 1000 h in superheated water. Sample L showed a smaller mean tensile-strength decrease than Sample Z after 168 h at 150 °C in dry air. In the hydrocarbon-medium summary data, XL95A/05B-S1 showed lower mass increase and smaller tensile-strength and yield-stress decreases than PERT XRT70H across the tested temperature range. The Communication provides case-specific screening evidence and identifies the need for replicated testing, statistical analysis, longer aging series, and structural characterization before general material-selection or durability conclusions are made.

Hydrogen transport under high-pressure conditions poses significant challenges for pipeline materials and structural design. Existing studies on PA12-based systems are primarily limited to material-level characterization, with insufficient validation at the pipeline scale. To address this gap, this study presents the design and system-level experimental validation of an all-thermoplastic composite hydrogen pipeline. A full-scale DN50 pipeline, consisting of a PA12 liner and a ±54° filament-wound carbon fiber-reinforced layer, was fabricated and tested under hydrogen pressures up to 10 MPa, including long-term exposure and cyclic loading. The results indicate stable deformation behavior and low hydrogen permeation (~10⁻¹⁴ mol·m/(m²·s·Pa)) within the investigated pressure range, with a burst pressure exceeding 60 MPa. A transition from stable to accelerated deformation was identified at elevated pressure, indicating a structural operating limit. Post-test observations reveal that interlaminar damage, rather than primary interface failure, governs long-term degradation. Based on these findings, a design framework integrating stress-based, deformation-based, and damage-based criteria is proposed. This work extends PA12-based hydrogen pipeline research from material-level understanding to system-level validation and provides practical guidance for structural design and performance evaluation.