Numerical analysis of a corrugated metal pipe: A case study

This article is a discussion of a case study of a conference paper of Kamal et al (2008) and verifies with advanced numerical tool. A HDPE double wall corrugated pipes was tested and numerically verified to evaluate the performance of a damaged underground pipe in Malaysia. The numerical tool, LUSAS, used by them produced ten times higher results over the experimental result. In this current project, more advanced numerical tool has been applied to verify the experimental result and found the results which are almost exact with the experimental result. In this study, four damaged sample of 600mm length and six undamaged sample of 200mm length of HDPE double wall corrugated pipes both collected for tests to be carried out in the laboratory. The damaged pipe samples are for the investigation of their physical properties and the undamaged samples for the estimation of physical and mechanical properties of the pipe material. Physical and mechanical properties of the HDPE double wall corrugated pipes implied that the material used for the pipes as cable ducting systems did not comply with the code specifications. The HDPE double wall corrugated pipe was damaged due to the excessive backfill load. The 5% deformation of the pipe external diameter (7.5mm) could sustain only 300N maximum load, which is much lower than the specified load of 450N.