TABLE OF CONTENTS An approach for the development of a design table for pile-supported buried pipelines was presented, which is characterized by evaluating uncertainties of the geometric properties, the material behavior and the loading of such structures by means of a synthesis of numerical modelling and experimental investigations. The material and geometric non-linear finite element model for ultimate load analyses of pile-supported buried pipelines was validated by laboratory experiments for a few selected types of pipes and by measurements on-site. Excellent correspondence of the experimental results, obtained in the laboratory and the respective computed values was achieved. Taking into account the difficult conditions for measurements on a construction site, even the correspondence of the computed strains in the pipes and the measured strains on site is rather good.
The close correspondence of the experimental and numerical results was achieved by the approach of conducting measurements and tests accompanying the development of the numerical model. The relatively close correspondence between the strains in the pipe measured on-site and the respective computed strains can at least partly be attributed to the fact that the line load q ? employed in the FE-analysis was determined from the pile forces measured on-site. The latter reflect in a broad sense the averaged actual soil-structure interaction, i.e. the loading. Such a favorable situation, characterized by the elimination of some of the uncertainties, associated with the loading, is only encountered in geotechnical engineering, if on-site measurements are conducted.
Following [19], describing the design as a decision...
