A Shell Model of a Buried Pipe in a Seismic Environment

Abstract

In a number of recent investigations, a buried pipe undergoing seismic excitation was modelled as a beam on a visco-elastic foundation. However, it is known that two of the observed failure modes in the buried pipelines under seismic loads are buckling and fracture. Therefore, in this paper, a thin circular cylindrical shell model in a resisting soil medium is used for a buried pipe. The coupled equilibrium equations arising from this model are modified to yield three decoupled equations which somewhat simplify the analysis. Then, an application for a long buried pipe is presented and the results are discussed and compared with those of the beam model.