Mechanical Failure Risk and Reliability Analysis of Buried Water Pipelines

Abstract

Water Pipelines are vital infrastructures of any country and their failure may have severe consequences. In this article, an attempt has been made to investigate a real project, the important uncertain variables in the system design have been identified and the failure risk and reliability of the water conveyance system have been calculated in two alternatives of a steel pipeline and a GRP pipeline. A wide range of system design variables including pipe structural characteristics, soil types, probability distribution parameters, and the correlation between them were determined as a multivariate normal distribution using Cholesky decomposition method. In the following, the uncertainty analysis of the system was carried out using the Monte Carlo simulation via Latin hypercube sampling. Then the complementary cumulative distribution functions of the output variables were calculated for each alternative and finally, the risk and reliability of the system were calculated in two alternatives based on passing certain design controls. The results showed that the reliability of the system is equal to 96.7% for the steel pipeline and 86.4% for the GRP pipeline.

Keywords

• water transmission system
• steel
• grp
• risk
• reliability