Abstract
Elevated pipelines are commonly encountered in petro-chemical and industrial applications. Within these applications, pipelines normally span hundreds of meters and are thus analysed using beam-type onedimensional finite elements when the global behaviour of the pipeline is sought at a reasonably low computational cost. Standard beam-type elements, while computationally economic, are based on the assumption of rigid cross-section. Thus, they are unable to capture the effects of cross-sectional localized deformations. Such effects can be captured through shell-type finite element models. For long pipelines, shell models become prohibitively expensive. Within this context, the present study formulates an efficient numerical modelling technique which effectively combines the efficiency of beam-type solutions while retaining the accuracy of shell-type solutions. An appealing feature of the model is that it is able to split the global analysis based on simple beam-type elements from the local analysis based on shell-type elements. This is achieved through a domain-decomposition procedure within the framework of the bridging multi-scale method of analysis. Solutions based on the present model are compared to those based on full shell-type analysis. The comparison demonstrates the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.
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Published on 01/01/2015
Volume 2015, 2015
DOI: 10.14264/uql.2016.624
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license
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