Influence of erosion voids and traffic loads on buried large-diameter reinforced concrete pipes

Abstract

Geotechnical centrifuge tests were conducted to examine the influence of invert voids and surface traffic loads on 1400 mm diameter reinforced concrete pipes buried with a shallow soil cover depth of 700 mm. Void formation beneath the pipe was simulated during centrifuge testing. The test results revealed that before void formation, the surface load directly above the middle of the pipe caused a significant increase in not only the circumferential bending moments but also the longitudinal bending moments, the latter of which was considerable and could not be ignored. Void formation beneath the middle of the pipe led to a reduction in both the circumferential bending moments and longitudinal bending moments at all measuring positions, i.e., crown, springline, and invert. The most significant reduction occurred at the invert, and there was even a reversal in the sign of the invert longitudinal bending moment. A comparison was made between centrifuge tests with erosion voids and surface loads at different horizontal positions, which had a marked influence even when the positions differed by half a pipe length. Joint rotation played an important role in relieving large bending moments of pipe barrels in a jointed pipeline when the void and surface load were located at the joint.

Keywords

Centrifuge test / Erosion void / Reinforced concrete pipe / Traffic loading / Longitudinal bending moment / Joint rotation

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ming Xu: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Dawei Shen: Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization, Writing - original draft.

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.

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful for the financial support received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51978382).

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