Stress-Crack Resistance and Life Prediction of Corrugated Recycled and Virgin HDPE Pipes Used in Road Drainage Systems in Quebec, Canada
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 35, Issue 1
Abstract
The design service life of 100 years is an essential requirement for modern corrugated high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe grades used in road drainage systems. Whether the recycled pipes guarantee performance and can be substituted for virgin pipes is also an issue in the process of being clarified. Furthermore, the variety of area characteristics and the specific serving conditions of the pipes significantly affect pipe service life. Therefore, the University of Sherbrooke and the Quebec Ministry of Transportation (MTQ) recently collaborated to conduct a project on the long-term performance of recycled and virgin HDPE pipes supplied by local manufacturers. This project included investigating stress-crack resistance (SCR) and predicting the service life of new corrugated HDPE pipes fabricated by Canadian manufacturers as well as corrugated HDPE pipes in field service in Quebec under natural aging. Notched specimens were cut directly from the HDPE pipe liner to evaluate their SCR. In addition, four exposure conditions were used: freeze–thaw cycles and exposure to saline, acidic, and alkaline solutions to predict the remaining lifetime of pipes. The SCR was investigated with the Florida test method in water at 3.10 MPa (450 psi) and 80°C, 4.48 MPa (650 psi) and 80°C, and 4.48 MPa and 70°C in compliance with FM 5-573. The data points at elevated temperatures were then shifted to predict the service life of pipes at lower service conditions with the Popelar’s shift method (PSM) and the rate process method (RPM), both of which are extrapolation methods. The results show that, before immersion in different solutions, the recycled could guarantee 100 years of service life as virgin pipes under service conditions of 10°C and 3.45 MPa (500 psi). After immersion, the decrease in SCR was related to the two steps of elevated temperature in the conditioned test and the Florida test, along with the harsh environment of the conditioned test. Moreover, RPM proved better than PSM, because the latter yielded nearly scattered, nonlinear data points.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published paper.
Acknowledgments
This research received financial support from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the NSERC Research Chair in Innovative FRP Reinforcement for Sustainable Concrete Infrastructure, the Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Composite Materials for Civil structures, the Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT), the Ministry of Transportation of Quebec (MTQ), and the University of Sherbrooke Research Centre on Composite Materials (CRUSMaC). The donation of HDPE pipes by Soleno Inc. (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC, Canada), Armtec Inc. (Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, QC, Canada), ADS Canada (Saint-Germain-de-Grantham, QC, Canada) and Infra Pipe Solutions Ltd (Mississauga, ON, Canada) to support this investigation are greatly appreciated. The authors are also grateful to the technical staff of the structural laboratory at the University of Sherbrooke, especially Jérôme Lacroix and Steven MacEachern, for their technical assistance. In addition, the authors are grateful to Mario Parades and TRI/Environmental, Inc. (TRI, Texas) for their valuable advice and performing SCR tests.
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Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 35 • Issue 1 • January 2023
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© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Dec 16, 2021
Accepted: Apr 19, 2022
Published online: Oct 18, 2022
Published in print: Jan 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Mar 18, 2023
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