Criticality Ranking and Condition Assessment of PCCP

The goal of a pipeline condition assessment program is to identify individual distressed pipe pieces or distressed sections of the pipeline that have high risk of failure and to repair such pipes in order to maintain pipeline reliability at a desired level. Implementation of a pipeline condition assessment program requires prioritization of all pipelines in the system to determine which pipelines to focus on first, selection of appropriate inspection technologies, implementation of inspection technologies, and interpretation of the inspection results. The purpose of this paper is to present a desktop model for prioritizing pipelines for inspection based on their criticality, failure risk curves for evaluating sensitivity to wire breaks for PCCP for the purposes of selecting appropriate inspection technologies, and field inspections for validating and refining the desktop model.