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Numerical calculation of buried pipeline impacted by rockfalls and landslide

deposits

ZhaoMing Zhou1, Fu Wan2 ,Weiqin Li3, Tiejun Lin4 and Taihe Shi5

1 Doctor, Southwest Petroleum University; Engineer, CCDC Safety, Environment,

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Quality, Supervision & Testing Research Institute; Nan-2nd section, Zhongshan

Road, Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, P.R. China 618300; Tel: 15881470922; Fax:
0838-5152181; Xindu Avenue 8#，Xindu District, Chengdu City, Sichuan，P.R. China
(610500); Tel: 15881470922; Email: zhouzhaom@126.com.
2 Senior Engineer, CCDC Safety, Environment, Quality, Supervision & Testing
Research Institute; Nan-2nd section, Zhongshan Road, Guanghan City, Sichuan
Province, P.R. China 618300; Tel: 13778208010; Fax: 0838-5152181; Email:
wantichang@hotmail.com.
3 Lecturer, Master,Southwest Petroleum University;Xindu Avenue 8#, Xindu District,
Chengdu City, Sichuan, P.R. China (610500); Mobile phone: 13094426544; Fax：
028-83035056; Email:sollor@126.com.
4 Lecturer, Doctor,Southwest Petroleum University;Xindu Avenue 8#, Xindu District,
Chengdu City, Sichuan, P.R. China (610500); Email: 124571458@qq.com。
5 Professor, doctoral supervisor, Leadingfigure Professionals of Sichuan Province;
Southwest Petroleum University; Xindu Avenue 8#，Xindu District, Chengdu City,
Sichuan，P.R. China (610500); Email:taiheshi@126.com.

ABSTRACT

The rockfall has threatened the safety of the pipeline when the natural gas pipelines
pass through the mountainous area. The main landslide prone areas represent a threat
against the pipeline system. They are identified and their landslide hazard needed to
assess.
In the study, the finite element model of the different sizes of rockfalls impacting
buried pipeline was established in ANSYS Workbench. Based on ANSYS/LS-DYNA
with the basic theory of nonlinear dynamic mechanics and dynamic calculation
method, in the semi-infinite soil medium, by setting dynamic and contact parameters
suitably, based on choosing suitable constitutive relation, the vibration rule of buried
gas pipeline is gained by the numerical simulation analysis. The study obtains the
physical process of intrusive rocks and soil and the stress of gas pipeline. Also the
study gets the damage of the different rockfalls impact accident. By the way of finite
element software ANSYS, the study calculates pipe stress under landslide deposits of
rock by contact problem, and determines the maximum Mises Stress Criterionand
failure length. The results provide the basis the data of estimating for the damaged
the high pressure gas pipeline.

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KEYWORDS

Buried Pipelines; Rock falls; ANSYS/LS-DYNA; Finite element; Landslide

INTRODUCTION
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Landslide varies widely in mountainous of Chinese western provinces, the Loess

Plateau in the northwest landslide is a wide range distribution. In order to pipeline
safety, pipelines are not laying in bad landslide-prone area, but the areas with a wide
range of landslide, landslide threats are inevitable. The 4,200km-long west-east gas
pipeline carries natural gas from Xinjiang to Shanghai, with through the different
provinces. The pipeline passed through the complicated geological conditions, the
pipeline construction often is threat by landslides.
The large diameter gas pipelines are most laying in the Hill Top or low valleys, the
local need to walk through the valley ridge of elevation 50 ~ 100m. The gas pipelines
easily subjects to impacted by dangerous rock. Pipeline construction in China is
facing the threat, such as earthquakes, landslides, mudslides and other geological
disasters. As of the end of 2006, oil and gas pipeline construction has more than
40,000 kilometers, the Chinese oil and gas trunk pipelines more than 10 million
kilometers until 2015 . Landslide, rockfalls, mud and debris flow, the potential
erosion thickness or/and the accumulated debris sediments were used as
references(Vasconez et al.,2010). Rockfalls is a common natural hazard that may
cause loss of life and significant damage to property and infrastructures, such as
transportation routes, vconstruction sites, and working faces in open pit mines. In
order to design effective rockfalls mitigation measures, it is necessary to understand
the rockfalls dynamics, such as rock fall trajectory, bouncing height, kinetic energy
of boulders and impact force(Wang et al.，2010). The large number of transport
energy, high temperature, high pressure gas or fluid pressure pipeline network are
damaged by the accident. The tube transport medium injection will form harmful
environmental pollution, and even cause an explosion or fire, resulting in life, a great
loss of property. In recent years, literature and accident statistics show that
third-party damage to oil and gas pipeline failure has become the main reason for
failure((MA, 2005 and JIANG et al.,1997).
For the oil industry, oil and gas pipelines is full of high-pressure gas medium. The
process of rockfalls impacting involves complex materials, such as soil, pipes and
rocks. The process relates to large plastic deformation, and plastic materials, while
there's a lot to think about the couple interaction. This article calculates the process
rockfalls impacting high-pressure buried pipelines and analyzes the damage of the
high-pressure buried pipeline by rock impacting with using of explicit dynamic
calculation software ANSYS / LS-DYNA. Ensuring the security of oil and gas

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migration is important, the analytical result provide the basis data for the
specifications of high pressure gas pipeline construction and safe operation.

Soil V=14m/s
Landslide Hazard
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Rock

ovince
Shanxi Pr
diagram
landslide Long Distance Pressure/
Pipeline and 10MPa
meshing

Figure 1. The finite element model of rock impacting pipeline

PHYSICAL MODELS AND MATERIAL MODELS

Finite element model. This article take the typical long-distance natural gas pipeline
in the valley as the research object, both sides of cliffs, steep slope areas occur falling
rocks. Assuming rockfalls volume is1m3, 8m3, 27m3, falling from 10 meters high,
crushing in the soil incumbent on buried pipelines. The initial velocity of rockfalls is
14m / s, in order to save computing time, the model ignores the rockfalls
whereabouts process in air. The diameter of buried pipeline is 1016mm, the thickness
is 21mm, pipe internal pressure is set to 10MPa, the buried depth of buried pipeline
is 1.5m. In this paper, rockfalls take as the center point of the cube, the cube side
length is 8m, the size of cube is enough big to calculate the soil of by rockfalls
affected. According to finite element theory the model take as a cube. The actual
model of the buried pipe is unlimited space and unlimited extension, all around of
model are set to non-reflecting boundary condition , this boundary condition simulate
a good solid model of infinite space. This paper created finite element model in the
ANSYS Workbench that shown in Figure 1. In order to ensure its calculation speed
and accuracy, the model mesh using hexahedral, while the contact area of rock fall
and the pipes and the soil are meshed refinement, the overall mesh shown in Figure 1,
a total of hexahedral element is 150,000 , the final output from the ANSYS
Workbench is the K file of ANSYS / LS-DYNA program.

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Table1. Relationship curve between the pressure and the volume strain
Volumetric strain Pressure /MPa Volumetric strain Pressure /MPa
0 0 0.246 80
0.104 8 0.271 160
0.161 16 0.283 240
0.192 24 0.290 320
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0.224 48 0.400 1640

Table2. Physical and mechanical parameters of buried

Denstiy Poisson’ratio Modulus of Tangent Yield Stress
3
γ/(Kn/m ) μ elasticity E/MPa modulus σy/MPa
Etan/GPa
7900 0.3 2.1e5 14 540

Material parameters. Soil and rock material constitutive equation has been a
research focus, there are many new developments, but also appear a lot of the new
model (Federal, 2004). There are a lot of rock material constitutive equation,
Drucker-Prager strength criterion ensure constitutive relation (ZHAO,2009), it can
simulate the plastic state of rock under the impact loading , and the large deformation
instability does not appear in the calculation. The material in the K file of ANSYS /
LS-DYNA program is * MAT_Drucker_Prager (LSTC, 2007). Plastic strength of
soil concerned with the confining pressure, therefore the soil material model’
materials keyword is * MAT_SOIL_AND_FOAM in finite element program. The
relationship between pressure and volumetric strain is shown in Table 1(WANG,2001
AND O'DANIEL,et al.,1997). The physical and mechanical parameters of rock and
soil is refer to the reference (YE,et al.,1991 and WANG 2001). The physical and
mechanical of the high pressure gas pipeline is steel X70 series, X70 is a low carbon
alloy steel. The literature (GUO et al., 2006 and YANG et al., 2003) indicated X70
series of steel with continuous yield characteristics, no significant yield platform,
with a very high elongation. It is elastic-plastic type material, the keywords in the K
file of ANSYS / LS-DYNA program is * MAT_PLASTIC_KINEMATIC. The model
comply with the Von-Mises yield criterion. According to the literature (YANG et al.,
2003 and JIA et al., 2005), the value of its physical and mechanical parameters are
shown in Table 2.

CALCULATION

The finite element model of block rockfalls hitting the buried pipe is parallelly
calculated on the large workstation, the time of calculation takes about 50 hours. To
save computing time, this paper only gets instant impacting process in 160ms time
period. Figure 2 shows the result of the displacement at the different sizes of rocks

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falling 0.16s. The rock have fallen into the soil at this time, can be seen from the
figure 2 shown the surrounding soil around the impact rock has been produced a big
pit. The pit of width and depth is increasing as the cell volume increased. The rock
and soil unit was a serious distortion, but also the shape of rock occurs seriously
distorted until fragmentation.
Figure 3 shows the rock Z direction velocity curves of the 1m3 rock model, the figure
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speed units is meters per second. The figure 3 shows that the rocks come into contact
with soil at 20ms, the speed increase due to gravity before landed, the speed began
sudden drop after in the rock. With the maximum negative acceleration, the impact
force is also the largest. Then the speed of the rock decreases by the soil barrier, and
finally, after a low bounce the rate is zero, the impact process is end. Figure 4 shows
the soil unit displacement curve of the different sizes of rock impacting buried
pipelines, the soil unit is selected one of the soil unit beneath rock. The direction of
the speed has been down before 160ms, so the soil unit displacement has increased.
With the volume increased, the displacement has been increased. The rock volume is
too large lead to the displacement decreasing. Figure 2 and Figure 4 can clearly
shown the process of rock fall in soil, the largest volume rock fall depth 900mm at
the 160ms time, the depth of the minimum volume rock fall is about 500mm. Figure
5 shows the equivalent stress contour of the pipeline in the different rock impact at
60ms, the moment of impact pipeline is largest at this time, the unit of equivalent
stress contour is Kilo Newton per square meters (kPa). With the volume of rock
increasing the impact force is gradually increases, and the equivalent stress is more
concentrated. The stress of pipe impacted by Three volumes rock did not reach the
material yield limit 540MPa, but the maximum stress buried pipeline impact by
27m3 rock is close to the yield stress, there is the great risk. According to analysis
the size and density to assess buried pipelines by the impact, this determine to do the
stress testing for pipe, and then make recommendations for the pipeline safety
working.

a) The Displacement imaging of 1m3rock impact into soil

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b) The Displacement imaging of 8m3rock impact into soil

c) The Displacement imaging of 1m3rock impact into soil

Figure 2. The rock overall displacement at 0.16s

Figure 3. The time curves of Z direction velocity

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the displacement in z-directio

200 1m3Rock
0 8m3Rock
-200 27m3Rock
（mm）
-400
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-600
-800
-1000
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
Time(ms)

Figure 4. The displacement curve of soil units by the different rock impact

a)1m3rock b)8m3rock c)27m3rock

Figure 5. The equivalent stress of the selected channel at60ms

LANDSLIDE

Landslide is a poor geological phenomenon, it is very harmful for buried steel pipes
of transportation crude oil, natural gas and refined oil products. Although the
landslide’s accident is not very common, this accident could be catastrophic.

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Figure 6. Landslide lead to talus slide

LANDSLIDE
PIPELINE

Figure 7. landslide pressure for straight pipelines and pipe displacements

Soils in the area tend to be very soft normally consolidated clays. The soil pressure
of the landslide against the pipeline was estimated considering the undrained strength
of the clay using a simple bearing capacity factor Nc. The undisturbed strength of the

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clay was considered, assuming a bearing capacity factor ranging from 10 to 20. This
simple representation of landslide pressures is reasonable, given the other
uncertainties in the problem. The soil pressure for these small slides was estimated to
be of the order of 1 to 5 kPa (Eric J, 2008). The slide was assumed to impact the
pipeline directly, perpendicular to the pipe axis. Landslide leads to talus slide, figure
6 show The FEM model of talus slide.
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The closed form solution was verified against results from numerical modeling using
the finite element method (FEM). The FEM model was developed using ANSYS
12.0. The pipeline was modeled as a series of pipe elements supported by axial and
transverse elastic-plastic springs. One half of the pipeline width was modeled,
considering a fixed boundary condition outside the limits of interest of the pipeline
and a symmetric boundary condition at the centerline of the slide. The slide was
modeled as a distributed load. The FEM model and results in terms of pipe
displacements are shown in Figure 7. The figure 7 shows the accumulation of
landslide hazards of cause how much damage for pipeline.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This paper gets the physical process of the rock impact buried pipelines with the
dynamic finite element analysis software, while the detailed data obtains during the
impact. With the increasing the volume of falling rocks the depth of the fall increases.
The equivalent stress in the pipeline increases, and the damage of the pipeline also
increases. This result can make qualitative assessments equivalent stress on the
piping, with different volume rock impacting, and provide the basis for assessing the
safety of pipelines migration. The pipeline of the smaller impact and less
deformation need to simulation, and need the on-site non-destructive testing ,and
stress testing to assess the safety of its operation.
Long-distance pipelines of transmission High-pressure gas and liquid often lie in
potentially hazardous working conditions. Dangerous rock falls or accidents have
sudden impact, which would be a serious threat to the safety of gas pipelines, it needs
to take security precautions. This paper simulation results and calculation methods
have great guiding significance for quality and safety of oil and gas pipelines running,
The selection material of high pressure oil and gas pipelines , and laying of pipeline
optimization.

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