Longitudinal Stress Analysis of Buried Pipes under Expansive Soils

Factors leading to buried pipe failures have been closely correlated to climate, location and surrounding soil type. Even though failures due to expansive soil movements is a major problem for water and gas pipe networks all over the world, limited research has been done to study the possible failure mechanisms. This article generates a simplified analytical method based on beam differential equation to evaluate the internal stresses induced in buried pipes subjected to swelling pressure and deformation of surrounding soils. Comparisons of the suggested analytical method and the results of the combined finite element model with the laboratory results done at Queensland University of Technology show the accuracy of the suggested method.