Analyzing and reviewing an fictious example Soil reports would display something similar to below:

Recall that the state of the elements is monitored at the center of each of the elements. Hence the three sets of results displayed in the soil report above are for the center of the three elements monitored: A00 to +1, +1 to +2, and +2 to A02. This helps in explaining the small vertical displacement value of 0.05 inches in the vertical direction for the element A00 to +1.

Next print out the the Displacements report for the same model and compare the soil deformation results with the pipe displacement results:

Notice that for the Displacement report, the results are displayed for the actual piping and virtual nodes and 4 sets of results are reported unlike the three sets reported by Soil report. That is why we see zero displacement at A00 where the rigid anchor is located. If we take the average of the displacements at any of the two nodes of an element from the displacement report, we will end up having the value reported by soil deformation. For example, consider the element spanning from +2 to A01 for GT1 combination:

• Pipe Displacement in Y direction at +2 = - 0.367 in
• Pipe Displacement in Y direction at A01 = - 0.704 in
• Average Displacement = (-0.367 - 0.704)/2 = -0.5355 in
• Soil deformation in Vertical direction for element “+2 to A01” = 0.54 in

We can see that we get the same magnitude when we average the values for two nodes. This is true for all the nodes / elements in this simple example as the soil has not yielded. 

Although we have seen that a correlation between the pipe displacements and soil deformation can be established, but what about the sign difference? The displacement report displays the displacement of the piping node relative to un-displaced geometry of pipe. Whereas the soil deformation report displays the relative deformation of base of the soil spring relative to the deformed position of the pipe node.