Staged Construction Modeling of a Large rge Diameter Steel Pipe Using 3-D Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis

摘要

Numerical analysis is performed to simulate the behavior of a buried steel pipe during stagedconstruction installation. The model deflections during staged construction process are verifiedwith two different experimental soil box test results. A parametric study on essential modelingparameters is performed to determine the proper modeling values for calibration. The finiteelement model and its associated analysis algorithm consider large deformation using totalLagrangian formulation. The material and contact nonlinear algorithms are also included in theanalysis for both soil and steel pipe materials. The contact between each soil layer and soil-to9pipe is carefully implemented for master and slave contact surfaces to simulate the test results.Uniform calibrated temperature loading is applied to simulate the stresses induced due tocompaction forces on the pipe and trench walls. Finally, the vertical and lateral load-deformationplots obtained from the FEM are compared with full scale experimental test results during thestaged construction process and after application of surcharge load. The results showed that theFEM simulation models the lateral effects of compaction properly. Also the FEM developedaccurately simulated the load–deformation results from the full-scale experimental tests.