A new proposal for simplified design of buried steel pipes crossing activefaults

Simplified design methods for obtaining the maximum strain in pipelines cro ssing active faults proposed by Newmark, Kennedy and Wang have not consider ed the section deformation of the pipe. In this study, a new simplified met hod is developed for obtaining the maximum strain in steel pipes crossing f aults considering non-linearity of material and geometry of pipe section. I t is assumed that the pipe will bend near the fault and the geometry of pip e in the longitudinal direction will change according to a bent deformation . On the other hand, the relation between maximum strain and bent angle has been obtained using a beam-shell hybrid FEM for different pipe-fault condi tions. The developed method can be used for calculating the maximum strains for fault-crossing steel pipes with different angles of crossing both in t ension and compression, by considering the deformation of the pipe cross-se ction. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.