Mitigating effect of embankment to adjacent pipe with CDM columns

Pipelines are valuable infrastructures that covering a large area or expanding to long distance for the transporting function. This leads to the variety of loads and effects applied on such buried structures. A thread to pipeline integrity is the construction of the embankment on the soft soil which leads to the displacement of the pipe adjacent to the slope. This displacement will effect to the increase of internal force or causing failure of the near-by pipes. The use of concrete pile to improve the soil properties may be a solution; however, the cost for this is expensive. To propose an alternative solution for the problem, this study uses a system of cement deep mixing, CDM, columns as the solution for protecting the pipe. A simple 2D Finite Element, FE, model using Plaxis software has been established based on the equivalent soil approach which considering the CDM columns and their surrounding soil as an unified soil. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been numerically investigated and proven. The lateral displacement of pipe and the maximum ring bending moment and other internal forces are significantly reduced with the appearance of the CDM columns. The selective parametric study has been implemented revealing the critical input variables are the distance of pipe to the slope and the length of the CDM column. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021.