Seismic Design Criteria for Buried Water Pipeline in Puerto Rico

摘要

The primary objective of this report was to determine the effect of earthquakes on buried water pipelines constructed in Puerto Rico. The work established the design earthquake parameters required together with a simplified dynamic analysis technique that considers the effect of the time history variation of the earthquake and of different soil layers along the conduit alignment. The simplified method assumes that the soil mass and the pipeline react to the earthquake ground excitation as a unit and that there are no relative displacements between the soil and the pipeline. The simplified model was used to determine the maximum axial strains for pipelines placed in homogeneous or in different soil masses. The study concluded that the axial strain is smaller for stiffer souls regardless of the pipe length embedded in the soil mass. The axial strains determined from this analysis can be combined with the additional stresses to determine the failure criteria for the pipeline.