PSI ELEMENTS MODELLING IN ABAQUS

Abaqus provides a library of pipe-soil interaction (PSI) elements to model the

interaction between a buried pipeline and the surrounding soil. The pipeline itself is
modeled with any of the beam, pipe, or elbow elements in the Abaqus/Standard
element library. The ground behavior and soil-pipe interaction are modeled with the
pipe-soil interaction elements. These elements have only displacement degrees of
freedom at their nodes. One side or edge of the element shares nodes with the
underlying beam, pipe, or elbow element that models the pipeline. The nodes on
the other edge represent a far-field surface, such as the ground surface, and are
used to prescribe the far-field ground motion (Abaqus example problems manual
v6.7).
This analysis consists of a 5km pipeline buried at a depth of 1.2m below the ground
surface. The outside diameter of the pipeline is 273.05mm and the wall thickness is
10mm. The pipeline is modelled with Pipe 31H elements with an imperfection
introduced at the midpoint of the pipeline by a sleeper modelled using analytical
rigid elements. A non-uniform mesh, with smaller elements focused near the
imperfection is used. The pipe-soil interaction behavior is model with PSI34
elements. The PSI elements are defined so that one edge of the element shares
nodes with the underlying pipe element, and the nodes on the other edge represent
a far-field surface where ground motion is prescribed the surface of the. Element
connectivity is used to describe the far-field surface and the surface that shares
nodes with the pipeline.
An important point to note is that the modelling was carried out using Abaqus
Keyword edition as the PSI elements are not supported in the Abaqus CAE interface.