علیرضا فیوض

Buried pipelines as the most significant lifelines play a major role in transporting water, oil, gas and the sewage. Being too long, these pipelines are most likely to cross areas with faults. Since permanent ground deformation is one of the main causes of the damages to buried pipelines, many researchers have studied the issue. In 2009, O’Rourke et al. conducted some experiments to investigate the response of buried pipelines subjected to strike-slip faults. In this paper, using Abaqus finite element software, a numerical simulation of a buried pipeline in soil under strike-slip fault is presented. Shell element was used to simulate the pipe and solid element to simulate the soil. Since the type of the plastic behavior simulation assigned to the soil has significant effects on the response of the pipe, soil behavior was simulated using behavior simulations available in Abaqus, Mohr-Coulomb, Drucker-Prager, and modified Drucker-Prager. Results of all three simulations were compared with laboratory findings. It was found that Drucker-Prager simulation and the modified drucker-Prager simulation could best estimate the experiment results, respectively.