Lateral and Uplift Capacity of Pipeline Buried in Seabed of Homogeneous Clay
Publication: Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice
Volume 12, Issue 3
Abstract
Buried offshore pipes are prone to upheaval and lateral buckling because of the high temperature and pressure of the materials being transported. An attempt has been made in the present study to evaluate uplift and lateral capacity of buried offshore pipes in a soft clay seabed using finite-element software. The numerical model used in the present study has been validated against results available in the literature. Finite-element analyses are carried out to study the upheaval and lateral buckling behavior of pipes for both the no-tension (NT) condition, i.e., when separation occurs between the pipe and soil, and the full-tension (FT) condition, i.e., when the soil beneath the pipe remains attached to the pipe. The variation of both uplift and lateral normalized capacity factors with soil cover depth ratio is presented for different combinations of soil strength and effective weight. Both uplift and lateral capacity factors have been found to increase and reach a constant peak value with increasing depth of soil cover. A transition from global and local failure mechanisms of a pipe is observed when the capacity factors attain their peak values at a limiting soil cover depth. The critical cases for the design of buried offshore pipe in homogeneous clay are established for both NT and FT conditions.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
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Published In
Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice
Volume 12 • Issue 3 • August 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 16, 2020
Accepted: Feb 22, 2021
Published online: Apr 26, 2021
Published in print: Aug 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Sep 26, 2021
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