SHM of buried pipelines for WDSs

Water distribution systems (WDSs) belong to the most critical infrastructure in modern society. Reliable and safe water supply is condition necessary to guarantee prosperity everyday life. Buried pipelines represent the typical distribution system used to supply water to the cities. The health state of buried pipeline decreases as function of time and becomes more vulnerable to catastrophic failure events. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the process of implementing an efficient strategy to evaluate the ability of a structure to perform and continuing to perform his function over time. Condition assessment (CA) is part of the SHM process and it’s essential in the maintenance phase of a system. In this research work an overview of the main CA monitoring techniques is presented. Behavior of steel pipes (SP) and Pre-stressed Concrete Cylinder Pipes (PCCP) according to their failure mode is described because they represent the most used materials in water pipeline distribution system for large diameters section. A new approach based on the variation of entropy is applied to evaluate damage detection. This method represents something unusual respect classic damage detection techniques known in literature and it will be explain taking in consideration the advantages in buried structure.