An equivalent-boundary method for the shell analysis of buried pipelines under fault movement

摘要

A new shell finite element method (FEM) model with an equivalent boundary is presented for estimating the re-sponse of a buried pipeline under large fault movement. The length of affected pipeline under fault movement isusually too long for a shell-mode calculation because of the limitation of memory and time of computers. In thisstudy, only the pipeline segment near fault is modeled with plastic shell elements to study the local buckling andthe large section deformation in pipe. The material property of pipe segment far away from the fault is consideredas elastic, and nonlinear spring elements at equivalent boundaries are obtained and applied to two ends of shellmodel. Compared with the fixed-boundary shell model, the shell model with an equivalent boundary proposed bythe study can remarkably reduce the needed memory and calculating time.