Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice

Gravity stormwater conveyance conduits are in need of special attention in terms of proactive/preventive asset management and rehabilitation/renewal strategies. Failure of these systems is costly for departments of transportation, both directly due to the replacement of the failed system and indirectly due to the time and money, and even in some cases lives lost, for the users of the highway. Different studies show that design and implementation of culvert renewal and rehabilitation methods are complex due to the depth of soil cover, traffic loads, type of embedment, culvert material, age, level of deterioration, access limitations, and so on. Spray-applied pipe linings (SAPLs) are used to renew deteriorated culverts and drainage structures for semistructural and structural applications. SAPLs consist of spraying cementitious or polymer (resin-based) materials inside a host culvert. Geopolymer and cementitious materials are categorized under cementitious SAPL, and polyurea, polyurethane, and epoxy are types of resins that are used in polymeric SAPL. The objective of this work is to present a literature review on progress acquired over the years in understanding the application of SAPLs in gravity stormwater conveyance conduits. This literature review comprises not only design methodologies and equations, but also covers methods and means for performance specifications and installations in rehabilitation and renewal of different types of SAPLs, such as invert paving, hand spraying, machine spraying, and others. Publications are identified that directly or indirectly reported the application of SAPLs in gravity stormwater conveyance conduits over the period from 1982 through 2021. Experimental and numerical literature was categorized into SAPL materials, structural behavior, soil–structure interaction, durability, and surface friction to be identified for flow capacity improvement. This literature review defines and categorizes the SAPL materials for structural and semistructural applications and suggests whether SAPLs can renew deteriorated culvert pipes in each of these conditions. Further research is needed to identify the behavior of different SAPL materials and their soil/host culvert structure interactions. Parts of the important gaps in knowledge are the impact of adhesion to the host culvert and the statistical percentile occurring this adhesion.

Infrastructure rehabilitation comprises remedial and prevention measures; however, preventing failure is not always possible, and direct investigations to find evidence of failure are challenging. Urban buried pipes are among the infrastructure that needs recurrent remedial actions. At this point, it is important to raise the question of what the appropriate strategy to locate or rehabilitate leakage is. This paper aims to implement and evaluate a Bayesian decision model for the maintenance planning of a water network. This includes the treatment of uncertainties in the evaluation of the best decision in a short-term perspective. To this end, a utility-based optimization routine based on the Bayesian theory has been used. The proposed model, due to its simplicity, can facilitate the initial problem-structuring in the process of decision-making under uncertainty. The model has been demonstrated on a water distribution network in Sweden, optimizing the decisions for locating and rehabilitating leakages. The results show that the cost of interventions and probabilities of leakages has a significant influence on the most appropriate decision.

Microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) is a common phenomenon in oil and gas industries. Sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) often leads to MIC and oilfield acidification. Glutaraldehyde is a highly effective biocide, which is used to kill SRB. In this paper, the effect of glutaraldehyde as a biocide against the MIC of X80 steel has been studied by weight-loss tests, electrochemical measurements, and surface analysis techniques. The results show that glutaraldehyde can effectively alleviate the MIC problem caused by SRB. After adding 100 parts per million (ppm) of glutaraldehyde, the number of SRB cells and the corrosion rate of samples decrease significantly. The damage of pitting corrosion caused by SRB on the surface of X80 steel is controlled by glutaraldehyde. Electrochemical measurements corroborate the weight-loss measured data and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images.

This paper proposes a novel mitigation approach to improve the safety and structural integrity of buried steel transmission pipelines subjected to ground deformation. This method involves altering the boundary condition of buried pipelines with adjacently installed special geomaterial blocks (SGBs) consisting of a set of expanded polystyrene geofoam and polypropylene squared plastic boxes. The proposed SGB allows accommodating ground deformation while significantly reducing the ground-induced forces in the pipe. The mitigation technique is first presented, followed by the experimental test program developed to evaluate the beneficial effects of SGB on the pipe response when subjected to lateral and oblique displacements. Furthermore, a simplified spring-based analytical modeling approach is proposed for predicting the force-displacement response of the pipe–SGB–soil assembly with emphasis on the interaction between the pipe and soil under the new boundary condition. The analytical model is validated using experimental test data. The results of the experimental tests confirm the efficiency of the proposed remediation and feature the relationship between the applied displacement and the force developed in the pipe. Furthermore, it is found that the proposed simplified analytical model can appropriately predict the expected reaction of the pipe equipped with the SGB.

Past earthquakes have revealed that earthquakes disrupt operations of underground water infrastructure systems. Assessment of the seismic vulnerability of underground water pipe networks plays a critical role in formulating preventive rehabilitation decision making to avoid high repair costs. Although existing seismic vulnerability assessment methods are sensitive to water pipe network uncertainties (e.g., uncertainties in nodal demand, reservoir head, and pipe roughness coefficient), the extent of the effects of these uncertainties on the postearthquake serviceability of the networks has not been examined. This research investigates the effects of water pipe network uncertainties on the seismic vulnerability assessment of networks. Transient ground displacements due to seismic wave propagation are considered for this investigation. The methodology includes seven steps: uncertainty identification and quantification, design of experiments, integrated multiphysics modeling, seismic repair rate calculations, Monte Carlo simulation, statistical analysis of the data (ANOVA and Tukey tests), and sensitivity analysis. Uncertainties in nodal demand, reservoir head, and pipe roughness coefficient were examined in this study. An integrated multiphysics model was created to simulate hydraulic network behavior and seismic vulnerability assessment. The approach was tested on two networks (New York Tunnel Network and Oberlin Network). The statistical analysis results indicated that the combined impact of the three selected water pipe network uncertainties on the seismic vulnerability assessment of networks is statistically significant. Nodal demand and pipe roughness coefficient uncertainties did not individually have a statistically significant effect. The individual effect of reservoir head uncertainty was statistically significant. Sensitivity analysis determined the minimum value of the coefficient of variation to have a statistically significant effect. Sensitivity analysis was divided into three parts to investigate the individual and combined effects of network uncertainties. The results from sensitivity analysis showed that a small uncertainty in reservoir head results in a statistically significant effect on seismic vulnerability assessment. By contrast, the coefficient of variation for uncertainties in nodal demand and pipe roughness has to be quite large to significantly affect seismic vulnerability assessment. Statistical analysis and sensitivity analysis results showed that water pipe network uncertainties have a statistically significant impact on seismic vulnerability assessment of networks. Hence, it is recommended to integrate water pipe network uncertainties with existing methods for assessing seismic vulnerabilities.

Risk-based inspection (RBI) analysis and recommendations provide an optimal strategy for inspection planning in the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. The RBI analysis and recommendations are performed based on qualitative, semiquantitative, and quantitative approaches. The suggested approach complements the qualitative RBI analysis approaches, as the existing techniques result in suboptimal inspection intervals. Although quantitative RBI methods have been well-developed for above-ground (and topside) piping and equipment, there is a significant need for developing quantitative or semiquantitative approaches for underground (or subsea) hazardous liquid pipelines. This manuscript presents a new approach to assess risk for liquid pipelines. The proposed method encompasses both time-dependent and time-independent damage types. In a proposed approach, for risk analysis of time-independent damages, an improved Kent Muhlbauer method is suggested. The improved Kent Muhlbauer method uses logical weight factors and modification factors which help to obtain repeatable results. In addition, the general failure frequency method as proposed in API-RP 581 is suggested for time-dependent damage types. The combination of these two methods constitutes the core of the proposed risk assessment algorithm of this study. The proposed method was implemented in a pipeline integrity assessment project. The overall study findings revealed that the results are satisfactory and reasonable and have a practical significance for inspection planning engineers.

The methodology commonly adopted for sewer design employs Manning’s equation for hydraulic calculations considering constant surface roughness values, thus neglecting the presence of biofilms, sediments, and obstacles under real operating situations. This paper analyzes the experimental results from several sewers and sewer design criteria and standards adopted around the world to mathematically model 3,964 representative sewage operation data points from the literature and 312 new pieces of data obtained in experiments carried out on a pilot scale and in actual sewer systems in Rio de Janeiro State (Brazil), encompassing different diameters, slopes, and materials. After statistical analysis and model validation, new design criteria are proposed for roughness values under real operating conditions of gravity sewers expressed using two novel roughness equations. These results lead to the recommendation to adopt Manning’s roughness equal to 0.013 (which amounts to a 1-mm roughness height) for early operation, 0.015 (or 3 mm) for long-term operation, and 0.024 (or 36 mm) for both internally corrugated pipes and sewers retaining deposited sediments or containing obstacles.

Underground water main leakage is one of the main causes of instability of soils and sinkholes. In the event of a water main burst, the pressure is upward and hence the soil layer should be analyzed for blowout stability. Conversely, leakage from low-pressure utilities such as sewer pipes would erode the surrounding soil media and leave it unstable with an internal opening created. In such a situation, the possible failure scenario would be in collapse stability. This study set out to quantify the collapse stability performance of three idealized cavity shapes above the damaged pipe. Advanced numerical limit analysis was used to obtain upper and lower bound solutions of the problem. The study provides useful engineering information in the form of design charts and tables for a wide range of design parameters, which can greatly assist in decision making by practical engineers.

This paper examines the role of pipe deterioration prediction approaches for optimizing maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation of buried water supply, wastewater collection, and drainage networks. It is appreciated that there are other ancillary assets within water supply and wastewater collection and drainage networks, but these were not considered in this paper. Currently there are a range of asset condition assessment frameworks, mainly based on asset defect location, identification, and characterization. These are infrequently applied in practice, mainly due to the restricted availability of asset defect inspection data. This paper reviews current deterioration modeling approaches and highlights the crucial need for broader, richer data sets (including both asset and surrounding environment data) to inform the development and application of such approaches. This paper describes what could be considered as an expanded ideal data set for deterioration modeling at a network and individual asset scale and indicates emerging new inspection technologies that should be capable of meeting the enhanced data needs.

Pull force estimation in horizontal directional drilling (HDD) is an essential step during the planning phases. Pull force calculation can be relatively complicated when considering variations during the HDD construction process compared with the design phases. Simplifications and assumptions need to be made as part of current design practice to approximate the pull forces expected in HDD pullback operations. However, a comprehensive assessment of pull force prediction accuracy has not been completed to date. A brief review of the current design practice and industry accepted engineering assumptions for pull force calculation for steel pipe is presented in this work. Data from 200 recent commercial HDD projects were studied to compare actual and predicted pull forces. The accuracy of the predictions was investigated based on different project categories such as pipe size, crossing length, geotechnical conditions, and equipment sizes. This study suggests that assumptions for pull force estimations need to be selected based on project-specific scopes and construction execution to increase the accuracy of pull force predictions.

In pressurized water delivery systems, the admission and release discharge coefficients directly affect the transient control effect of air valves; however, the selection of the admission and release discharge coefficients in hydraulic transient numerical simulations has not been clearly specified. Herein, transient discharge theory was applied to study the influence of the admission and release discharge coefficients of an air valve on the transient control effect of a water delivery system. The method of characteristics combined with specific examples was used to numerically simulate the transient pressure control effect of a traditional air valve and an antislam air valve with different admission and release discharge coefficients. The results provide a theoretical basis for selecting the admission and release discharge coefficients of air valves and enable a reasonable selection of air valves during the numerical simulation of hydraulic transient values for a pressurized water delivery system.

Corrosion failure generally results in pipeline leakages during oil production. This paper systematically investigated the pipeline failure events in an oil treatment station of Tahe oilfield in the last 20 years were to identify the key factors causing localized corrosion of pipeline steel. Obviously, the failure events propagated along the spatial locations of transportation and there was a delay of several months from the oil pipelines to the water pipelines. Intensive failure of oil pipelines in 2012 deteriorated the water chemistry of the production fluids in the downstream pipelines. The spatial transmission of pipeline failures was attributed to the possible ingress of oxygen or other aggressive species during the frequent leakage and maintenance of the pipelines, locally damaging the integrity of the preformed corrosion product layers on pipeline steel. This understanding of pipeline failure based on a historical analysis provides guidance for future pipeline design and maintenance work.

Essentially, water is an extremely vital resource for human beings. However, each year, a significant amount of water is lost because of leakages in multiple water distribution systems. From this perspective, much ink has been spilled upon the issue of water leakage detection and location. Indeed, since the emergence of data and interest in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, leak detection and location solutions have been optimized. This survey aims to present a comprehensive review of leak detection and location techniques in water distribution networks (WDNs). The different categories of leak detection and location solutions are set forward, in particular the intelligent ones. A comparative study between AI algorithms is performed using scenarios from the LeakDB data set. To our knowledge, this is the first work that uses a common benchmark data set to offer a comparative experimental study of the most used algorithms in leak detection. The selective choices of scenarios and experiments grant a deep understanding of the leak detection works, as well as a support for future research to develop artificial intelligence methods in this area.

Because leaks tend to form at joints or welds at the intersection of modular pipes, the occurrence of multiple leaks in a long pipeline is possible. In this study, a multiple-leak detection methodology using an acoustic method was adopted. A mathematical model based on using the transfer matrix method for calculating the sound transmission loss in a pipeline with multiple leaks is presented. It was found that one can clearly differentiate the transmission loss spectrum of multiple leaks from that of a single leak. It was also established that one can distinguish the transmission loss spectra of pipes having two or three concurrent leaks. The transmission loss curves further appear to provide useful indications on the level of leaking severity.

Pipe jacking is a special tunneling method for installing underground pipelines or tunnels with the minimum surface disruption. Longitudinal pipe-to-pipe joints are important for tunnels with the pipe-jacking technique. The longitudinal joint generally adopts the socket type, that is, a bell-and-spigot joint, designed for use with gaskets work well for jacking. The joints should have sufficient bearing surfaces to transmit the required axial thrust and have the ability to resist lateral forces from ground movements during tunnel construction and operation. This paper focuses on the mechanical performance of the longitudinal joint of the superlarge cross section quasi-rectangular pipe-jacking tunnel under the action of local bending moments caused by lateral forces. A full-scale ultimate bending test of the local joint specimen was carried out to study its bearing mechanism, ultimate bearing capacity, and failure mode. Numerical simulations were then employed to analyze the performance of the joint specimen and were verified by the experimental results. The damage evolution process and bearing mechanism changes of the joint specimen were analyzed by numerical simulations. The results show that the bell part contributes much more to the bending of the joint than the spigot part. The bolt contributes little to the bearing capacity and stiffness of the joint but plays a role in positioning the pipe to pipe in the installation. The bending failure of the joint is characterized by weld fractures between the longitudinal rib and its flange next to the V-groove weld at the bottom of the bell part. The V-groove weld connecting the bottom of the spigot part and the bell part primarily affects the bending capacity of the joint.

The fundamental function of a natural gas pipeline network is to transport enough natural gas to users. Therefore, user characteristics should be considered in the formulation of the flow allocation plan of the pipeline network under accident conditions. However, user characteristics have usually not been considered in previous flow allocation models. In this study, a mixed integer linear programming model is developed to determine the optimal flow allocation plan of a large-scale and complex natural gas pipeline network under accident conditions, and the user characteristics are considered as well. The optimization objective is to maximize the weighted sum of the amount of natural gas transported to the consumers under accident conditions, and the weights of the natural gas users are obtained by user characteristics analysis. The model constraints include flow constraints, gas source supply capacity constraints, user demand constraints, pipeline transmission capacity constraints, pressure constraints, and pipeline hydraulic constraint. For the sake of model simplification, the hydraulic constraints are treated piecewise linearly. Furthermore, the model is set into a real-world situation, which is the natural gas pipeline network located in China, and the user characteristics are considered in the optimal flow allocation plan under accident condition. The impact of user characteristics is further investigated by calculating and comparing the flow allocation plan when considering and ignoring user characteristics. The study indicates that when user characteristics are considered, the natural gas pipeline network will tend to give higher priority to those crucial users.

The cavitation problem at the valve section of the filling and emptying system is a very prominent hydraulic problem in high-lift navigation locks. Drawing air into the valve section is an economic and effective method to alleviate and even avoid the cavitation problem. However, the existing spatially fixed aeration facilities cannot efficiently solve the cavitation problem arising from the shear flow below the valve lip (called valve lip cavitation problem) for those high-lift navigation locks operated under fluctuating water levels. Thus, a new aeration feature located at the valve lip was proposed, which can move with the valve and draw air to the shear flow. The specific valve lip style and aeration slot style together with its location are determined through analysis on the results of both numerical simulation and a physical model. Dimensional analysis demonstrated that $k/k_i$ (relative cavitation parameter $k/k_i$, $k$ is the actual cavitation parameter and $k_i$ is the cavitation index at which cavitation is incipient) is mainly affected by $n$ (relative valve opening), $H/A_V^{0.5}$ ($H$ is lock lift and $A_V$ is the cross-sectional area of the valve section), and $h_s/A_V^{0.5}$ ($h_s$ is initial submerged water depth), with a certain structure and size of the culvert system. A total of 16 groups of experiments were conducted and 160 groups of data were analyzed by means of the full factorial method (FFM). With the proposed aeration feature, air can be drawn smoothly into the culvert system under those operating conditions requiring cavitation alleviation. The aeration intensity of the aeration feature is positively related to the severity of valve lip cavitation. Combined with drawing air at the valve slit, the new aeration feature can reduce the submerged depth of the valve section, simplify the culvert style near the valve, and broaden the efficient work head range of locks.

Climate change has been linked to the occurrence of rainfall events with higher frequencies and intensities in various urban areas around the world. Existing stormwater systems in many areas are more frequently experiencing overloading beyond their design capacities, leading to more frequent flooding events. Recent technological advances surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) have made it possible to retrofit existing stormwater infrastructure systems with cyber-physical technologies at lower costs. This paper presents the design and prototype implementation of an automated stormwater management system that uses inexpensive microcontroller units coupled with smart sensors and valves to minimize flooding events. The system design comprises a sensing layer to collect, control, and transfer real-time data; a gateway layer to receive, store, and process data; and an application layer to define interactions between system components. As such, the system aims to go beyond simple monitoring of stormwater levels and allow actions to be taken automatically. This paper demonstrates the testing of the system at a small lab scale experiment. It is anticipated that future versions of the proposed system will offer the potential to provide an automated and cost-effective solution to managing entire urban stormwater systems.

In a pilot study for the diagnosis through transient tests of the water distribution systems of Milan, Italy, hydrants were used for both pressure measurement and pressure wave generation. In the field tests, the maneuver of the hydrant valve used for the pressure wave generation led to an increase in the measured pressures due to the trapping of the pressure waves inside the hydrant connection. In this paper, the trapping phenomenon was analyzed in time and frequency domains to evaluate analytically the effects of the connection geometric characteristics on the pressure variations. The results of field and laboratory tests are shown to confirm the theoretical considerations and extend the investigation to viscoelastic pipes. Because the same phenomenon can also take place in user connections, which present a similar combination of pipe impedance and geometry, the similarity of hydrant and user connections in terms of the response to transients was also explored. Results of the case study and their interpretation can be relevant for the diagnosis of water distribution systems through transient tests and for the design of hydrants and user connections.

This paper presents the results of the tests executed at the Water Engineering Laboratory (WEL) of the University of Perugia for evaluating the performance of cast iron pipes with the cement mortar coating refined by a lapping process. The implications of the achievement of smooth pipe behavior with regard to the carrying capacity of new pipes are discussed.