Research Article Uplifting Behavior of Shallow Buried Pipe in Liquefiable Soil by Dynamic Centrifuge Test

Copyright © 2014 Bo Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Underground pipelines are widely applied in the so-called lifeline engineerings. It shows according to seismic surveys that the damage from soil liquefaction to underground pipelines was the most serious, whose failures were mainly in the form of pipeline uplifting. In the present study, dynamic centrifuge model tests were conducted to study the uplifting behaviors of shallow-buried pipeline subjected to seismic vibration in liquefied sites. The uplifting mechanism was discussed through the responses of the pore water pressure and earth pressure around the pipeline. Additionally, the analysis of force, which the pipeline was subjected to before and during vibration, was introduced and proved to be reasonable by the comparison of the measured and the calculated results. The uplifting behavior of pipe is the combination effects of multiple forces, and is highly dependent on the excess pore pressure. 1