Study on Mechanical Failure Behavior of Steel-Wire Wound Reinforced Thermoplastic Pipe under Combined Internal Pressure and Soil Landslide Conditions

A steel-wire wound reinforced thermoplastic pipe (SWW-RTP) has been widely utilized in many industrial areas, and a soil landslide is an inevitable hazardous extreme condition for the SWW-RTP as it is usually buried underground. It is imperative to study the mechanical failure behavior and the failure criterion of the SWW-RTP under the combination of internal pressure and soil landslide conditions, and this paper is the first study to investigate the topic. In this paper, groups of stress–strain curves of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and steel wires were obtained by uniaxial tensile tests at different strain rates, with the help of a Digital Image Correlation device (DIC). A rate-dependent constitutive model was employed to represent the mechanical behavior of the HDPE and to help deduce the stress–strain curve of the HDPE under the required strain rate, estimated from the static simplification of the dynamic soil landslide. Afterwards, a finite element model of the SWW-RTP, embedded in a cubic of soil, was established with the software ABAQUS. The SWW-RTP model was composed of HDPE solid elements, embedded with steel-wire truss elements, and the soil was characterized with the extended Drucker–Prager model. A quartic polynomial displacement distribution was applied to the soil model to represent the soil landslide. Then, the mechanical response of the SWW-RTP was analyzed. It was found that the failure criterion of the HDPE yield was more suitable for the pipe subjected to internal pressure and soil landslide conditions, instead of the steel-wire strength failure criterion always used in traditional research on the SWW-RTP. Further, the influence of landslide width, internal pressure and steel-wire number were discussed. The larger the width of the landslide area, the gentler the deformation of the pipeline; this resulted in an increase in the maximum landslide and a decrease in the maximum curvature with the width of the landslide area. The relatively high internal pressure was beneficial to the safety of the SWW-RTP under landslide, because the internal pressure could increase the stiffness of the pipeline. The number of steel wires had a limited influence on the maximum landslide required for the SWW-RTP’s failure. This work can be useful for the design and safe assessment of the SWW-RTP under internal pressure and soil landslide conditions.