Buried petroleum pipelines with localized defects are vulnerable to blast loading, and an effective damage assessment method for polyurea-reinforced defective pipelines is still lacking. In this study, full-scale blast tests and numerical simulations were combined to investigate the dynamic response and damage characteristics of standard and polyurea-reinforced N80 buried pipelines with localized defects under shallow-buried blast loading. The experimental results showed that, at a scaled distance of 0.23 m/kg1/3, polyurea reinforcement reduced the maximum dent depth from 69 mm to 63 mm, corresponding to a reduction of 8.69%, and decreased the peak overpressure on the blast-facing surface by 23.0% compared with the unreinforced pipeline. Based on the critical dent depth-to-length ratio of 0.072, a pressure–impulse (P–I) damage evaluation curve and its fitted equation were established for engineering assessment. The proposed method establishes a preliminary framework for evaluating blast-induced damage in buried polyurea-reinforced petroleum pipelines with localized defects under the specific tested conditions and provides a preliminary framework and a basis for future research, while its general applicability remains to be further validated. Therefore, this work is explicitly designated as a pilot study that offers initial insights under the tested conditions, and further research is needed to validate its broader applicability.
Li et al. (Sat,) studied this question.