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National Database Structure for Life Cycle Performance Assessment of Water and Wastewater Rehabilitation Technologies (Retrospective Evaluation)
Citation:
Allouche, E., S. Alam, W. Condit, AND J. Matthews. National Database Structure for Life Cycle Performance Assessment of Water and Wastewater Rehabilitation Technologies (Retrospective Evaluation). U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-14/251, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Use of trenchless pipe rehabilitation and pipe replacement technologies has increased over the past 30 to 40 years and represents an increasing proportion of the approximately $25 billion annual expenditure on the operation and maintenance of the nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure (EPA, 2002). Prior to this initiative and despite the massive public investment represented by the use of these technologies, little formal and quantitative evaluation in the U.S. has been conducted on whether or not the pipes were performing as expected and if rehabilitation was indeed cost-effective compared to replacement. An initial pilot study was funded under EPA’s Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program for the development of a sample recovery and testing protocol together with the recovery and extensive testing of four samples of cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) liners from two participating cities. This research expanded upon the initial efforts by: collecting more CIPP samples, collecting retrospective evaluation samples for additional rehabilitation technologies (e.g., other than CIPP), and developing the structure for a national database on the performance of trenchless rehabilitation technologies. This report presents the results from building a database to document the performance of rehabilitation technologies on a national basis including additional CIPP liner testing, testing of three other types of rehabilitation technologies (sliplining, fold-and-form, and deform-reform), and a review of the overall experiences with sewer rehabilitation technologies.
Description:
This report builds upon a previous pilot study to document the in-service performance of trenchless pipe rehabilitation techniques. The use of pipe rehabilitation and trenchless pipe replacement technologies has increased over the past 30 to 40 years and represents an increasing proportion of the approximately $25 billion annual expenditure on the operation and maintenance of the nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure. This report describes the establishment of a database to house performance evaluation data for rehabilitation technologies used in the water and wastewater sectors, carries out additional retrospective evaluations of cured-in-place-pipe (CIPP) rehabilitation projects and begins the evaluation of several fold-and-form, deform-reform, and sliplining projects. The new retrospective data for CIPP and the testing of the other rehabilitation technologies are described in detail. The CIPP data are combined with the pilot study data for an overall assessment of the current status of CIPP life cycle performance. The potential uses of the database for data mining of key trends are demonstrated based upon the CIPP technology performance data. The examination of CIPP liners with up to 34 years in service and other rehabilitation technologies with up to 19 years of service has shown that all of the rehabilitation technologies are showing little evidence of deterioration in service. The test results for 18 CIPP samples from nine cities across North America indicate that properly designed and installed CIPP liners should meet and likely exceed the typical 50-year expected design life. For the fold-and-form, deform-reform, and sliplining projects, there are only two to three samples per rehabilitation technology and hence less can be said about overall performance. Nevertheless, all of the samples tested still met the material property requirements at installations after 14 to 19 years of service. In summary, this provides an excellent prognosis for the rehabilitation technologies on which the nation is depending.