Nationwide Survey on the Pipe Performance for Drinking Water and Force Main Pressure Pipe Applications

Choosing the correct pipeline for a certain application in water or wastewater networks can play a vital role in reducing short-term operations cost for the utility as well as long-term benefits of improved asset lifespan. Wide variety of pipe materials available to choose from can leave the decision makers for pipe selection confused, especially in absence of comparative performance evaluation. This paper proposes a process for knowledge accumulation and sharing for pipeline performance through the life cycle. The study presented herein is the analysis of nationwide survey on pipeline performance in terms of operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, failure rates and characteristics as well as user perception and opinions for pressure pipe applications (4” and larger diameter) in drinking water and force main pipeline networks. The pipe performance for different pipelines including reinforced concrete cylinder pipe (C300), prestressed concrete cylinder pipe (C301), bar-wrapped concrete cylinder pipe (C303), Asbestos cement (AC), HDPE, PVC, steel, ductile iron (DI), cast iron (CI), Fiberglass etc. have been analyzed in the diameter ranges of 4”-14”, 16”-36” & larger than 36”. The complete performance analysis of a pipe can only be carried out with several other parameters, but the main aim of this study is to determine O&M costs, number of failures per mile and age at failure along with overall experience of a wide spectrum of industry experts from utilities and various service providers with different pipelines. The study also incorporates results from focus group workshop that was conducted to review the findings and analysis from the survey responses. The focus group meeting also gave a chance to the experts to give their inputs on performance factors that were not collected through close-ended questions in the survey. The results obtained allow characterizing and understanding in further depth the behavior of these pressure pipelines.