Experimental Study on Mechanical Response of Defective Gas Pipeline Under Heavy Vehicle Load

Abstract Pipeline is one of the infrastructure that ensures people’s livelihood and social production. With the acceleration of urbanization, the impact of vehicle overload on the safety of buried pipelines is becoming increasingly serious. Especially for buried defective gas pipelines with a long service life, when the pipeline ruptures due to vehicle loading, it can cause serious fire and explosion accidents, seriously affecting the safety of urban areas. Experimental study on mechanical response of defective gas pipeline under heavy vehicle load is carried out in the paper. The considered pipeline defect conditions include defect size and defect location. Based on the research results, it can be found that under vehicle overload conditions, the deformation variables of pipeline end defects are significantly lower than those in the middle. As the axial length of the defect increases, the strain at the defect site of the pipeline can decrease to a certain extent. Pipeline strain is more sensitive to defect size than defect location, and defect size may be a high-risk point for pipeline failure under heavy load conditions. There is consistency between the overall deformation of the pipeline and the strain test results. Pipeline deformation is more sensitive to defect size than defect location, but its overall characterization ability is not as good as the strain parameters at the defect location.