Soil Restraint Against Lateral and Oblique Motion of Pipes Buried in Dense Sand

This paper investigates the soil restraint against lateral and oblique motion of pipes buried in dense sand. A series of two- and three-dimensional finite element analyses are performed for pure lateral and combined axial-lateral relative pipeline/soil displacement. The commercially available finite element software package ABAQUS/Standard is used in numerical analysis. The analyses are performed for two burial depths. The numerical model is verified by comparing with model test results available in the literature. The built-in Mohr-Coulomb model in ABAQUS is used for modeling the soil. It is shown that an advanced soil constitutive model might be required for better modeling of pipe/soil interaction behavior.