Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The media now provide regular reports of catastrophic failures of water and stormwater pipes, such as the severe flooding caused by the watermain break on St. Catherine St., Montreal on January 28th, 2013, and the corrugated steel culvert failure on Highway 174, Ottawa on September 4th, 2012 which caused a sinkhole that 'swallowed' a car. Canada's water infrastructure is reaching a point where safe and efficient operation cannot be guaranteed without a better understanding of the failure mechanisms associated with corroded pipes, and guidance on assessment and repair strategies. The Water: Management and Assessment of Infrastructure (WaterMAIN) project will address key issues by investigating (a) the remaining strength of buried deteriorated cast iron and corrugated steel pipes after they are damaged by corrosion, (b) the impact of soil erosion due to water flow adjacent to pipes, (c) novel methods of identifying, monitoring and assessing these structures, and (d) the short and long term performance of repair techniques. The research project capitalizes on specialised infrastructure for conducting buried pipe experiments at Queen's, permitting unique experiments at full scale that will provide seminal data on pipe behaviour and the performance of assessment tools, and will produce significant advances in numerical modeling of deteriorated structures and the soil surrounding them. The project will advance scholarship on the interaction of soil and deteriorated pipe structures, and the development and impact of erosion voids beside pipes. It will produce design and assessment guidelines for the municipal government partner, and the three consulting companies working in the specialized areas of municipal pipe assessment and repair, and geotechnical engineering. Five doctoral and four masters graduate students will be trained, highly qualified personnel that will be of considerable value to Canada's vibrant Civil and Geotechnical consulting industry.