Peter Airey BE GradDipAdmin FIEAust CPEng RPEQ, Managing Director of Airey Taylor Consulting – presented three papers to the Australasian Structural Engineering Conference of 2018 (held between 25 September – 28 September 2018 at Adelaide Convention Centre). His presentations were for the topic ‘Forensic Engineering – Lessons from failure or success.’
The second of these papers was entitled “Investigation of pipeline failure”, and is an examination of the results of forensic engineering studies on the bursting of a section of 800mm diameter buried high density polyethylene (HDPE) pipeline near Carnarvon WA. This presentation is number 144 on your conference program.
The Powerpoint presentation from the conference is available here, and the accompanying paper is available here.
Excerpt :
“Inspection of the failed pipe indicated that the pipe wall has yielded from an average thickness of 31.8mm to 5.2mm before final rupture. The yield was equivalent to about 612%. Published test data for HDPE indicates that elongation prior to rupture is typically 636%. AT the time of failure it was estimated that the ground temperature adjacent to the pipe would have been in the range of 30 – 35° which could have lowered the pressure rating of the pipe by about 10% (from 630 kPa to approximately 580 kPa).”
