A Study on Seismic Behavior of Buried Steel Pipelines Crossing Active Faults

Some known phenomena which cause a buried steel pipeline to fail are large ground motion and landside. Thus, many researchers have studied pipelines behavior against those phenomena with simplified assumptions in which effects of interaction between soil and pipe are not considered as well. In this study, the behavior of a pipe through Normal and Strike slip faults and contact between them are simulated close to reality with the powerful software of ABAQUS. The results from a parametric analysis on effects of those faults on buried steel pipelines show that increasing the angle between the pipe axis and fault plane (up to 90°), as well as the pipe thickness, and decreasing the burial depth diminish the probability of pipe failure crossing active faults. Change in pipe diameter also affects the pipe strength to a lesser degree.