This study was initiated to examine the stress and deformation characteristics of the pipelines which were subjected to various environmental conditions in order to confirm their integrity. As the part of them, this paper presents the analysis results for the effect of ground subsidence combined with main loads on buried natural gas pipelines. The ground subsidence which can occur for buried gas pipeline has been classified to the three cases.
Finite element method was used to analyze the effect of ground subsidence on pipeline of 26 inch (0.660 m) and 30 inch (0.762 m) diameter used as high pressure (70 Kgf/cm2(686.4 Pascal)) main pipelines.
This paper shows the result of stress analysis for the pipelines subjected to those three case ground subsidence. Comparing these results with safety criterion of KOGAS (0.9 σ y), maximum allowable settlement and loads have been calculated.
