Continuum FE Modeling of Lateral Buckling: Study of Soil Effects

2D and 3D Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) Finite Element (FE) models are developed to study soil-pipe interaction and lateral buckling problems. A new in-situ testing method to characterize seabed soils and to obtain soil constitutive parameters is proposed. The influence of the soil properties on the soil-pipe interaction and lateral buckling processes are presented. Implications and observations for the design of high temperature and high pressure pipelines are discussed.Copyright © 2007 by ASME