Technical Blog

It is estimated that there are more than a million miles of installed PVC water pipe in rural communities across America – enough to go to the moon and back twice. At an average of say $25 per foot installed, that’s more than $125 billion in pipe value!

Guide for PVC sewer force mains uses recently developed method for cyclic-fatigue design.

Find out how to objectively evaluate sustainability and environmental claims for underground infrastructure.

PVC pipe — an excellent choice for ground-movement situations

Calculator for designing PVC pipe for internal pressures.

SHARE On its website the Plastics Pipe Institute (PPI) has a design tool called “PACE” (Pipeline Analysis and Calculation Environment), for the design of surge pressures for plastic pipes. The tool includes comparison of PE and PVC pipes.

Calculator for designing PVC pipe for earth and live loads.  Users input soil and pipe parameters to calculate deflections.

Some project specs require Ductile Iron (DI) pipe because of its supposed “strength” in resisting external loads. In the past it was true that iron pipe had plenty of pipe stiffness, but that was before the iron industry converted from thicker-walled Class pipe to thinner-walled Pressure Class pipe.

“Conservative” design is taught continually to all engineers during college and throughout their employment. I think we can all agree that this is a good idea – we don’t want engineers to cut corners and cause potential problems.

The presence of air in a pressure pipeline is unavoidable, since dissolved air is present in the fluid being transported. This entrained air comes out of the fluid during certain operating conditions and gathers in pockets at high spots in the pipeline.