Multi-Scale Overlapping Domain Decomposition to Consider Elasto-Plastic Local Buckling Effects in the Analysis of Pipes

Elevated pipelines are commonly encountered in petro-chemical and industrial applications. Within these applications, pipelines normally span hundreds of meters and are thus analyzed using one-dimensional (1D) beam-type finite elements when the global behavior of the pipeline is sought at a reasonably low computational cost. Standard beam-type elements, while computationaly economic, are based on the assumption of rigid cross-section. Thus, they are unable to capture the effects of cross-sectional localized deformations. Such effects can be captured through shell-type finite element models. For long pipelines, shell models become prohibitively expensive. Within this context, the present study formulates an efficient numerical modeling which effectively combines the efficiency of beam-type solutions while retaining the accuracy of shell-type solutions. An appealing feature of the model is that it is able to split the global analysis based on simple beam-type elements from the local analysis based on shell-type elements. This is achieved through domain-decomposition procedure within the framework of the Bridging multi-scale method of analysis. Solutions based on the present model are compared to those based on full shell-type analysis. The comparison demonstrates the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.