LARGE SCALE EXPERIMENTS OF BURIED STEEL PIPELINES WITH ELBOWS SUBJECTED TO PERMANENT GROUND DEFORMATION

摘要

Earthquake-induced Permanent Ground Deformation (PGD) can affect significantly underground lifelines, such as buried gas and water pipelines. This paper describes large-scale experiments to investigate the efforts of PGD on buried steel pipelines with elbows, and to validate and calibrate a hybrid finite element (FE) model that combines beam elements for straight pipe, shell elements for the elbow, and spring-slider elements for soil-pipeline interaction. The analytical model is able to simulate the experimental response in a reliable way for dry sand, and for partially saturated sand with an adequate correction factor. Using the analytical model, recommendations are proposed for enhancing the earthquake-resistance of buried pipelines with elbows subjected to PGD.