Resource efficient and coordinated maintenance and renewal of water and sewerage pipes and streets (2019-2022)

Water and wastewater systems are ageing and renewal is slow. In Sweden, the current renewal rate is more than 250 years in many places. This is despite the fact that there are numerous leaks in the drinking water network and around 20% of the drinking water produced does not reach customers.

The situation is at least as bad on the sewerage side. The leaky pipes lead to a leakage of groundwater and surface water that corresponds in volume to the amount of wastewater to be transported in the pipes. This leads to overflows of untreated wastewater and increased costs for transportation and treatment.

When the sewerage network is renewed, it may be because a sewer has reached the end of its useful life, but it may also be because other work needs to be done in connection with the sewer trench (e.g. other sewers need to be renewed or new asphalt pavement needs to be laid). A pipeline may also be replaced due to lack of capacity even though the pipeline quality is still acceptable. These practices result in the replacement of pipes that are functioning relatively well, and are not always resource efficient.

With the current research project, we therefore intend to develop strategies for long-term planning of renewal of water and sewer pipes where the focus is on optimizing the coordination between renewal of different types of pipes and also street renewal. This is to make the renewal more resource-efficient in the long term, both from a natural resource and economic perspective. Since utility work in the street environment also causes inconvenience to road users, business owners and residents, it is also in the interest of developing coordinated strategies to minimize disruption.

In order to develop resource-efficient and coordinated strategies for long-term planning of utility renewal, this project will (I) develop procedures for efficient and high-quality management of data on the status of utility networks that maximize the usefulness and sharing of data. Furthermore, (II) the statistical description of the lifetime of different pipe types (pipe material, age class and pipe type) will be improved so that the lifetime curves used to predict the lifetime of a pipe mainly describe the aging of the pipes. Currently, the available statistics for pipe renewal intervals also include the replacement of pipes due to other street works and the replacement of pipes due to lack of capacity. Furthermore, it is intended to (III) develop more knowledge about the extent to which pipes and pavements age together in order to optimize the renewal of the infrastructure (water and sewer pipes together with the pavement). Based on the above work packages (I, II and III), the obtained data will be synthesized (IV) through statistical processing to develop strategies that can contribute to a more optimized and coordinated pipe renewal.

Furthermore, we are interested in collaborating with as many municipalities and water utilities as possible in order to collect a large statistical base. Interested parties are welcome to contact us.

This project is funded by Formas and will be carried out in collaboration between researchers at Luleå University of Technology, NTNU in Trondheim and SINTEF in Oslo.

Researchers

• Annelie Hedström Opens in new window.
• Emmanuel Okwori Opens in new window.
• Youen Pericault Opens in new window.