Investigation of the Dynamic Behavior of Buried Natural Gas Pipe System

Natural gas pipelines are important infrastructure elements that are often designed to be buried and can cross very long distances, both on the mainland and on the ocean seabed. In this context, researches on the safety of these structures, which are known to cause significant economic losses if damaged, still maintains its importance. From this point of view, the dynamic behavior of a buried pipe system modeled using the equivalent spring-dashpot approach is investigated for three different soil systems and two earthquake records with three different frequency contents. The research shows that while the peak von mises stress of the pipe system can generally decrease depending on decrease in soil stiffness, the peak lateral displacements of the pipe system can generally increase depending on the decrease in soil stiffness. Furthermore, the results point out that the peak von mises stresses and the lateral displacements of the pipe system can significantly increase from high frequency content to low frequency content depending on the frequency content of earthquake.