Lifelines provide the vital utilities for human being in the modern life. They convey a great
variety of products in order to meet the general needs. Also, buried continuous pipelines are
generally used to transmit energy sources, such as natural gas and crude oil, from production
sources to target places. To be able to sustain this energy corridor efficiently and safely,
interruption of the flow should be prevented as much as possible. This can be achieved providing
target reliability index standing for the desired level of performance and reliability. For natural
gas transmission, assessment of earthquake threats to buried continuous pipelines is the primary
concern of this thesis in terms of reliability. Operating loads due to internal pressure and
temperature changes are also discussed. Seismic wave propagation effects, liquefaction induced
lateral spreading, including longitudinal and transverse permanent ground deformation effects,
liquefaction induced buoyancy effects and fault crossing effects that the buried continuous
pipelines subjected to are explained in detail. Limit state functions are presented for each one of
the above mentioned earthquake effects combined with operating loads. Advanced First Order
Second Moment method is used in reliability calculations. Two case studies are presented. In the
first study, considering only the load effect due to internal pressure, reliability of an existing
natural gas pipeline is evaluated. Additionally, safety factors are recommended for achieving the
specified target reliability indexes. In the second case study, reliability of another existing natural
gas pipeline subjected to above mentioned earthquake effects is evaluated in detail.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12615423/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
| Creators | Yavuz, Ercan Aykan |
| Contributors | Yucemen, Semih M. |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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