A semi-analytical method of stress-strain analysis of buried steel pipelines under submarine landslides

•A method to stress-strain analysis of pipelines under the landslides is proposed.•The estimated deformation and strain coincides well with that from FE analysis.•The effects of engineer parameters are investigated through parametric studies.

A semi-analytical method of the stress-strain analysis of buried steel pipelines under submarine landslides was proposed, considering the nonlinearities of the pipe-soil interaction and mechanical properties of the pipe steel. The pipeline was divided into three parts according to different loading conditions, and the corresponding differential equations were established based on a combination of the beam-on-elastic foundation and elastoplastic-beam theories. According to the second-order central difference method, the transverse horizontal displacement was calculated, and then the bending strain was obtained based on the relation between bending strains and curvatures. Considering the interaction between the axial and bending strains, the axial strain can be derived from the equilibrium condition by equating the axial force. The proposed method was verified through the comparison of obtained solutions to ANSYS results, with minor deviations which do not exceed about 4.6%. Additionally, the effects of the slide width, the buried depth of pipelines, the internal friction angle of soils, the cohesion of soils and the bulk density of soils are investigated through parametric studies.