The effect of flexible connection on reducing the damage of buried gas pipes due to ground displacement

One of the major challenges for the oil and gas industry is to keep buried metal pipes safe from faulting. This article discusses a solution to keep buried pipes safe. Wave-shaped joints, by their local deformation, create a rotational joint in a limited area so that other parts of the pipe remain intact. Abacus software was used to model the behavior of buried pipes due to slip direction fault displacement. In order to confirm the validity of the results of the numerical model, the pipe performance due to large axial displacement was compared and validated with the experimental results. An examination of the numerical results indicated that the presence of a wave connection can lead to a very good performance of the pipe in eliminating the buckling area and reducing the amount of plastic strain by approximately 80%.