Abstract
It is estimated that 82% of the cast-iron pipe stock in North American water distribution systems have outlived their useful service life. Previous studies have shown that moisture-induced soil expansion is a dominant failure mechanism in pipe stock buried in expansive soils; however, this risk has not yet been quantified formally. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the risk of fracture of cast-iron pipes subjected to moisture-induced soil loading. A recently developed mechanics-based pipe–soil interaction model and fracture mechanics with corrosion degradation are used to set up the reliability analysis. Monte Carlo simulation is implemented to synthesize various uncertainties into a probabilistic estimate of the failure of a pipe segment defined by its configurational parameters and age. It is observed that smaller-diameter pit-cast pipes are most at risk, and factors other than age may have a significant impact on pipe failure. The most influential input parameters are identified through a sensitivity analysis, and it is found that the contributions of corrosion parameters and soil expansion parameters to the failure probability are most significant. Limitations of the proposed framework and the areas where more research is needed are discussed in the end.
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Data Availability Statement
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Some or all data, models, or code used during the study were provided by a third party, including pipe failure data and pipe network properties. Direct requests for these materials may be made to the provider as indicated in the “Acknowledgments.”
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Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request, including MATLAB codes.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the City of Sacramento in providing data for this study, and Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council of Canada through their Discovery and Strategic Project Grants program. The authors would like to thank Dipanjan Basu, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo, for his invaluable inputs. The views and opinions presented in this paper are strictly of the authors.
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Published In
Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice
Volume 12 • Issue 4 • November 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 13, 2021
Accepted: Apr 23, 2021
Published online: Jul 8, 2021
Published in print: Nov 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Dec 8, 2021
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