Effect of pipe installation and external load on buried steel pipe responses: Experimental and numerical investigations

Abstract

During pipe installation, compacting soil at pipe sides causes an initial pipe deformation which is known as the “peaking” effect. However, in conventional pipe design codes, only pipe deformation caused by vertical overburden is considered while the “peaking” effect is ignored. In this study, a full-scale test was conducted on a Grade X52 steel pipe with a diameter of 600 mm to investigate the impacts of both soil compaction and vertical overburden on pipe deformation. Soil compaction and external load were found to elongate and shorten the vertical pipe diameter, respectively. The “peaking” effect was observed during the installation procedure accompanied by the highest pipe stress measured at the pipe crown. Then, a two-dimensional finite element model was created and validated based on the calculated pipe stresses from the experimental study. A parametric study was performed thereafter to numerically study the impacts of soil water content, pipe wall thickness, compaction pressure, and lift thickness on pipe responses due to soil compaction and external load. An increase in the “peaking” effect is observed with increasing soil water content and compaction pressure, while an increase in pipe wall thickness or lift thickness would cause a decrease in the “peaking” effect.

Keywords

X52 steel / Soil compaction / External load / Peaking effect / Pipe deflection / Soil arching

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

Technical assistance in experiments from Rajitha Wickramage, Don Anson, Terry Quinn, and Daniel Larson are appreciated. The authors appreciate the financial support provided by the Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (Grant No. 10021614), Enbridge Inc. (Grant No. 10022179), and University of Calgary.

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