Investigation of gas distribution pipes subjected to ground movements

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Pipelines are lifelines of modern society, which are used to supply water and energy for our living. However,pipeline incidents, such as leaks and failure, can have significant economic and environmental consequences.Leaking from energy pipelines can contaminate the environment and cause a fire hazard. The groundmovement has been identified as one of the causes of pipeline incidents. Pipes buried in the moving groundexperience loads that induce excessive stresses and strains on the wall, causing leaks and/or failures. However,no acceptable design method is currently available for the assessment of pipe wall stresses and strains due tothe ground movement loads, particularly for small diameter pipes used in gas transmission and distributionsystems. The objectives of the current study are to develop methods for stress/strain assessment of gasdistribution pipes subjected to the ground movement loads and a pipeline integrity assessment framework toidentify high-risk areas. Full-scale laboratory testing and finite element (FE) modelling of soil-pipe interactionwill be performed to develop simplified tools for the assessment of the pipes in the gas distribution network. Asimplified design tool is required for practicing engineer for the assessment of the operational conditions ofpipes in service, where detailed FE modelling is considered costly and inconvenient. Tests will be conducted toexperimentally examine the behavior of the pipes using a novel laboratory test method to simulate groundmovement scenarios expected in the field. FE modelling techniques will be developed using Abaqus FEsoftware to simulate the observed responses from the tests. It is proposed to apply supervised machine learningregression methods using the data from the laboratory tests and FE modelling to develop the simplified methodof pipe strain assessment. The findings from this research will advance the knowledge on pipelinesexperiencing ground movements and would be useful for mitigating the risks of pipeline failures. Thus, theresearch findings will contribute to providing natural gas supply to the Canadians effectively and safely andthus, to the protection of the Canadian environment from gas leakage.