Stress Distribution of Buried Concrete Pipe Under Various Environmental Conditions

Abstract

There are numerous factors that affect stress distribution in a buried pipe, such as the shape, size, and stiffness of the pipe, its burial depth, and the stiffness of the surrounding soil. In addition, the pipe can benefit from the soil arching effect to some extent, through which the overburden and surcharge pressure at the crown can be carried by the adjacent soil. As a result, the buried pipe needs to support only a portion of the load that is not transferred to the adjacent soil. This paper presents numerical efforts to investigate the stress distribution in the buried concrete pipe under various environmental conditions. To that end, a nonlinear elasto-plastic model for backfill materials was implemented into finite element software by a user-defined subroutine (user material, or UMAT) to more precisely analyze the soil behavior surrounding a buried concrete pipe subjected to surface loading. In addition, three different backfill materials with a native soil were selected to examine the material-specific stress distribution in pipe. The environmental conditions considering in this study the loading effect and void effects were investigated using finite element method. The simulation results provide information on how the pressures are redistributed, and how the buried concrete pipe behaves under various environmental conditions.