Numerical simulation on the effectiveness of using viscoelastic materials to mitigate seismic induced vibrations of above-ground pipelines

Abstract

a b s t r a c tPipeline systems are commonly used to transport oil, natural gas, water, sewage and other materials. They are normally regarded as important lifeline structures. Ensuring the safety of these pipeline systems is crucial to the economy and environment. There are many reasons that may result in the damages to pipelines and these damages are often associated with pipeline vibrations. Therefore it is important to control pipeline vibrations to reduce the possibility of catastrophic damages. This paper carries out numerical investigations on the effectiveness of using viscoelastic materials to mitigate the seismic induced vibrations of above-ground pipelines. The numerical analyses are carried out by using the commercial software package ANSYS. The numerical model of the viscoelastic material is firstly calibrated based on the experimental data obtained from vibration tests of a 1.6 m long tubular sandwich structure. The calibrated material model is then applied to the above-ground pipeline system. The effectiveness of using viscoelastic materials as the seismic vibration control solution is investigated. The influences of various parameters, including the constraining arrangement scenarios, the constraining length and angle, the thicknesses of the viscoelastic material and constraining layer are discussed in detail. The influence of earthquake frequency content is discussed as well. Numerical results show that with properly selected viscoelastic materials and constraining layers, the proposed method can be used to effectively mitigate seismic induced vibrations of above-ground pipelines.

Analytical fragility curves for assessment of the seismic vulnerability of HP/HT unburied subsea pipelines

“…Previous studies show that due to the interaction between S-waves and P-waves, especially at resonant frequencies of propagating waves in the water, only the vertical seafloor motion is affected by the surrounding seawater [31,32]. Following the numerical model proposed by Bi and Hao [33], an above-ground steel pipeline with outside diameter of OD = 350 mm, single span length of 16 meters and mechanical parameters represented in Table 1 is modelled using commercial finite element analysis (FEA) package ABAQUS [34]. The numerical mesh is shown in Fig.…”

“…The considered single span pipe (referred to as "the original pipe" in [33]), is placed on a soil domain characterized by two layers. The properties of the soil layers are given in Table 2.…”

“…The soil domain has surface dimensions of 48×48 m and a total depth of 40 meters. Bi and Hao [33] investigated seismic responses of single span simply supported and continuously simply supported pipelines. For the validation purpose in the current work, only the single span simply supported pipeline with length of 16 m is modelled.…”

Experiment Investigate on the Effectiveness of Flexible Pipes to Isolate Sea-Water Pump Generated Vibration

“…Zhou [18] and Pan [19] focused experimental research on a vibration isolation platform for momentum wheel assembly and laminated rubber bearings to isolate metro generated vibration respectively. Kaiming Bi [20] proposed properly selected viscoelastic materials and constraining layers vibrations of above-ground pipelines can be effectively mitigated. Double layer metal bellows (DLMB), rubber pipes (RP) and bellows coated rubber (BCR) are widely used for isolation in other engineering.…”

Numerical Modeling of pipes conveying gas-liquid two-phase flow

“…Therefore, the methods and problems of the theory of hereditary elasticity attract much attention of researchers. There are a significant number of publications devoted to solving problems of calculating the characteristics of viscoelastic pipelines [14][15][16][17].…”