Pipes inevitably encounter high ambient pressure and bending moment during the deepwater pipe-laying process,which can lead to elliptical buckling and even deterioration failure.For the safety of pipe-laying operation,available formalas for the pipe stability are established on the basis of the assumption of uniform deformation along the tube length and symmetrical buckling.This method can predict the nonlinear rcsponse of elliptical collapse of steel circular tubes for different ratios of diameter to thickness (D/t) under pure bending or combined bending and external pressure.In these formulas,the strain-displacement relationship is deduced from the nonlinear ring theory,and the Ramberg-Osgood constitutive model is applied to simulate the inelastic material behavior.Meanwhile,the principle of virtual work is adopted to derive the equilibrium equations.A set of equations is solved by the Newton-Raphson method,and the iterative scheme contains nested iteration for the constitutive relation.In order to check the effectiveness of this theoretical method,illustrative examples are presented in this paper.Besides,the numerical simulation is carried out by use of ANSYS.A comparison of the results shows that the theoretical method can provide reasonable prediction for engineering practice.