Soil Pressure Measured at Various Fill Heights Above Deeply Buried Thermoplastic Pipe

When a flexible pipe is installed in a dense soil fill, stress redistribution takes place around the pipe because of pipe-soil interaction. The degree of this interaction is considered to be influenced by the stiffness ratio between the pipe and its surrounding soil. Classical theory based on elastic solutions shows that in an ideal installation condition, the zone of the pipe-soil interaction may be confined to one to two pipe diameters from the pipe. In 1999 a research team from the Ohio Research Institute for Transportation and Environment installed a total of 18 instrumented thermoplastic pipes at the deep pipe burial project site in Albany, Ohio. These pipes were placed under either a 6.1-m or 12.2-m (20-ft or 40-ft) embankment fill. During the pipe backfilling and subsequent embankment fill placement, soil pressure cells were placed at different fill heights above selected test pipes to measure the vertical extent of the pipe-soil interaction zone. The field-measured vertical soil pressure compared well with the predictions made by the elastic solutions. Summarized here are the information and data related to the vertical soil pressure measurements made in the Ohio University field study.