Refinement to the Existing Analytical Methods of Analysis of Buried Pipelines due to Strike-Slip Faulting

Analytical methods presented to analyze the buried steel pipelines at strike-slip fault crossing use the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The cross-section of a buried pipe that is completely surrounded by soil cannot rotate freely and would not be remained perpendicular to the bending line after deformation. So it would be better to take into consideration a rotation between the cross-section and the bending line. The developed model improves the existing methodologies by using the Timoshenko beam theory and considering the shear deformations as a refinement to the existing methodologies. The proposed model results are compared with the results of an existing analytical model and it is found that the maximum bending and axial strains decrease with taking into consideration the shear deformations. Furthermore, it is shown that the difference between the results of models increases with an increase in the burial depth.