WALL THRUSTS AND MOMENTS FOR BURIED RIGID PIPE

Despite that buried rigid pipes have been used since the beginning of modern civilization, the pipes are still designed based on different semi-empirical methods. This paper presents a comparison of the buried pipe designs and responses predicted using different methods and illustrates the performance of these methods. It is revealed that the indirect design method provides both conservative and unconservative estimate of the pipe responses depending on the magnitude of the pipe bedding factor. Analyses based on the continuum theory and finite element method show that the wall thrust and bending moment of a rigid pipe depend on the hoop and bending stiffnesses of the pipe-soil system, respectively. The thrust and bending moment decrease with the increase of the hoop and bending stiffness due to development of arching. Finally, simplified equations are proposed in this study to calculate the springline thrust and moment based on soil-structure interaction analyses.