Longitudinal pipeline-soil interaction: results from field full scale and laboratory testing

This paper describes some experimental work carried out on the longitudinal pipeline-soil in-teraction problem, within a research program undertaken to increase safety in the manage-ment of Italian-gas distribution network. A longitudinal interaction can be generated by the soil downward movement when a pipeline traverses an unstable slope, mainly along its steepest descend direction. The experimental work aimed at verifying the effectiveness of some interpretative models to represent the soil-pipe interaction phenomenon and to establish reference values for model parameters to assess magnitude of interaction forces, with differ-ent pipe coatings and backfill materials.