The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the investigation of the stress distribution problem along above-ground pipelines due to the presence of friction on the supporting saddle interfaces. To this end, a static structural analysis problem for an above-ground pipeline loosely resting on frictional steel saddles is formulated and studied. The problem is formulated as a quadratic programming problem with respect to the displacements and next with respect to the forces. A double-step iterative scheme for the solution of the unilateral contact problem with friction proposed by Panagiotopoulos is applied. Within each step, the respective quadratic programming problems are numerically treated by applying either the Theil-van de Panne or the Hildreth-d'Esopo method. The proposed solution strategy leads to the accurate calculation of the stress distribution along the pipeline. A numerical application illustrates the proposed method and a comparison between the corrective stress distribution and this one obtained by assuming frictionless contact is given.

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