The effective planning of water distribution system renewal requires accurate
quantification of the structural deterioration of water mains. As typical water distribution
systems comprise hundreds and even thousands of buried pipes, direct inspection of all of them
is often prohibitively expensive. Identifying water main breakage patterns over time is an
effective and inexpensive alternative to measuring the structural deterioration of a water
distribution system. Environmental and operational conditions exert stresses on the pipe. Pipe breakage occurs
when these stresses exceed its structural resiliency. While the structural deterioration of the pipe
is generally considered to be a steady, monotonous process, some of the environmental and
operational stresses could be time-dependent, steady or transient. These stresses result in noisy
breakage 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 be
identified 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 by
time-dependent factors. The method is versatile enough to consider any number of underlying
causes but the solution becomes more complex as the number of causes increases. The method is
demonstrated with three case studies that examine the effect of temperature, soil moisture, main
replacement rates and cathodic protection rates on pipe breakage patterns. Finding the true
deterioration rates of buried water mains will inevitably lead to a more accurate prediction of
their useful life, which in turn will lead to a more efficient allocation of resources for water main
rehabilitation and renewal. Includes 26 references, figures.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 160 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 12 |
| Published : | 01/01/2000 |
