Responses of buried pipelines to earthquake-induced landslides: 1-g shake table tests

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the position of pipes buried in sloped ground on their responses to landslides. To achieve this purpose, a 1-g shake table test was conducted. Similitude laws were employed to construct the physical modeling. Four aluminum pipes were installed at different positions but at identical depths of the model ground. All the pipes had a direction angle of 70 degrees relative to the landslide direction. They were heavily instrumented with pair strain gauges to measure pure bending strain. Besides, two strain gauges were installed on each pipe to measure axial strain. The model was fully instrumented with acceleration and displacement transducers. These sensors were located at adequate distances from container walls to minimize the effects of boundary conditions on the results. Input shaking consisted of 25 sinusoidal cycles of loading with an amplitude of 0.32 g and frequency of 5 Hz. The input shaking was representative of an earthquake with M_w of 8.25. The shaking was applied parallel to the ground slope. The results showed that the lower part of the slope was the most critical location for buried pipes. On the contrary, the toe of the sloped ground was the safest location for the pipes against landslide hazards.