Full Description

The effective planning of water distribution system renewal requires accuratequantification of the structural deterioration of water mains. As typical water distributionsystems comprise hundreds and even thousands of buried pipes, direct inspection of all of themis often prohibitively expensive. Identifying water main breakage patterns over time is aneffective and inexpensive alternative to measuring the structural deterioration of a waterdistribution system. Environmental and operational conditions exert stresses on the pipe. Pipe breakage occurswhen these stresses exceed its structural resiliency. While the structural deterioration of the pipeis generally considered to be a steady, monotonous process, some of the environmental andoperational stresses could be time-dependent, steady or transient. These stresses result in noisybreakage rate data sets that reduce the accuracy of establishing the underlying deterioration(aging) patterns, especially in small data sets. If the cause of these random stresses can beidentified and attributed to a measurable phenomenon (e.g., temperatures, precipitation, etc.),their noisy effect can be neutralized to obtain a more accurate pipe deterioration pattern.A method is presented to analyze how breakage rate patterns in water mains are affected bytime-dependent factors. The method is versatile enough to consider any number of underlyingcauses but the solution becomes more complex as the number of causes increases. The method isdemonstrated with three case studies that examine the effect of temperature, soil moisture, mainreplacement rates and cathodic protection rates on pipe breakage patterns. Finding the truedeterioration rates of buried water mains will inevitably lead to a more accurate prediction oftheir useful life, which in turn will lead to a more efficient allocation of resources for water mainrehabilitation and renewal. Includes 26 references, figures.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 01/01/2000 Number of Pages: 12File Size: 1 file , 160 KB