SADDLE-SUPPORTED PIPELINES - COMPUTATION OF THE PRESSURE DISTRIBUTIONON THE PIPE-SADDLE INTERFACE

In the present paper a new method is proposed which concerns the accur ate computation of the unilateral contact forces and displacements bet ween a circular cylindrical shell and its supporting saddles, The here in proposed method is based on the formulation of a linear complementa rity problem (LCP) (or equivalently of a quadratic programming problem (QPP)) which numerically describes the behaviour of an elastic body w ith unilateral contact boundary conditions and leads to a variational inequality formulation of the problem at hand. The previously mentione d LCP is a direct extension of the Force Method of Structural Analysis and has the great advantage of lending to a straightforward and accur ate computation of the distribution of stresses on the pipe-saddle int erface. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights resreved.