The effect of the rubber tube length of in-pipe occluder on the plugging performance

The rubber tube is the core component in the plugging module of the occluder inside oil and gas pipeline. In order to study the influence of the axial length of the rubber tube on the plugging process, the mechanical properties of rubber materials were tested, and material nonlinearity and contact nonlinear theories were studied in this paper. Then, the mechanical model for simulating the plugging process of rubber tube was established by means of dynamic finite element simulation method. After this model was used to simulate and analyze the plugging process of rubber tube of different lengths, the influential laws of the rubber tube length on the plugging performance were summarized. The results show that under the same driving force, the contact force between the rubber tube and the pipeline wall decreases with the increase of the effective length of the rubber tube, and correspondingly the equivalent stress and contact stress decreases as well. Therefore, in the selection stage of the rubber tube of the occluder, it is necessary to select the rubber tube with shorter effective length under the premise that the effective plugging length after the compression shall be greater than the safe length threshold of the plugging.