Numerical techniques for design calculations of longitudinal bending in buried steel pipes subjected to lateral Earth movements

This paper presents simplified finite-element analysis procedures based on geometrical nonlinearity and ductile Mohr–Coulomb–Davis plasticity for analysis of bending behaviour of steel pipes subjected to lateral soil loading. A simple, and easy to implement, user-defined subroutine to represent soil stiffness using the Janbu model is also presented and discussed. The development of a three-dimensional (3D) finite-element model is presented, and its evaluation against experimental measurements is discussed. Data are presented for different burial depths of the pipe, including soil loading on the pipe as well as 3D responses, longitudinal bending deflections and pressure distribution along the pipe. It was shown that numerical analyses which include soil modulus dependency on confining pressure lead to effective 3D calculations of pulling forces, bending moments along the pipeline and flexural deformations, based on measured soil parameters. The 3D analysis model requires the use of lower order (linear displacement) elements, which overestimated peak mobilized load. However, those 3D calculations effectively provided the progress of both the load–deflection and longitudinal bending response of the steel pipe at embedment ratios up to 5 where most energy pipelines are buried.