Seismic strain analysis of buried pipelines in a fault zone using hybrid FEM-ANN approach

Abstract

This study was concerned on the application of a hybrid approach for analyzing the buried pipelines deformations subjected to earthquakes. Nonlinear time-history analysis of Finite Element (FE) model of buried pipelines, which was modeled using laboratory data, has been performed via selected earthquakes. In order to verify the FE model with experiments, a statistical test was done which demonstrated a good conformity. Then, the FE model was developed and the optimum intersection angle of pipeline and fault was obtained via genetic algorithm. Transient seismic strain of buried pipeline in the optimum intersection angle of pipeline and fault was investigated considering the pipes diameter, the distance of pipes from fault, the soil friction angles and seismic response duration of buried pipelines. Also, a two-layer perceptron Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was trained using results of FE model, and a nonlinear relationship was obtained to predict the bending strain of buried pipelines based on the pipes diameter, intersection angles of the pipelines and fault, the soil friction angles, distance of pipes from the fault, and seismic response duration; whereas it contains a wide range of initial input data without any requirement to laboratory measurements.