Laboratory and Full Scale Testing of a Pull-in-Place PVC Pipe

The Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) installation industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the North American underground construction sector, representing a commanding share of utility services installed in urbanized areas. The growing need for renewal of the buried municipal infrastructure in urban areas focused much attention on HDD as a technically viable and cost effective method for the installation of water distribution systems and pressurized sanitary sewers with minimum surface disturbance. Consequently, there is a growing need for a variety of pipe products that meet relevant AWWA and CSA standards and are suitable for installation using the HDD method. The paper describes the development and testing of a new restrained joint for rigid pipes that enables the installation of standard C-900 bell-and-spigot pipes using the HDD or Pipe Bursting (PB) construction methods. In particular, the paper will cover the design concept, and laboratory testing for tension and bending, finite element modeling of the new joint and the results of a full-scale field test. The latter involved the installation using a HDD rig of an 110m long, 100mm diameter, bell-and-spigot C-900 PVC pipe column that utilized the new restrained joint. The pull-head as well as the two leading joints were instrumented to measure the tensile and shear stains that developed in the pipe during the installation.