Pipe Bursting

How often do you find that pipe replacement and upsizing aren’t as straightforward as they appear in text books? Existing pipes may be buried deep in the ground making traditional trenching expensive and time–consuming. Excavations along busy highways are difficult to manage and meeting demanding reinstatement criteria can add considerably to costs. You may be operating in an area where different utilities are crowded together creating access problems. The pipeline may pass through a brownfield site, or under a building; it may be a site where the visual impact of works needs to be minimised. In all of these cases, pipe bursting is an alternative well worth considering.

Turriff uses pipe bursting technology to install new polyethylene pipes along the route of existing gas, water or sewer pipelines. It is often assumed you can only burst cast and ductile iron pipes, but pipe bursting can also be used on clay, concrete, steel, cement and PVC pipes.

Faster than traditional cut and lay, pipe bursting is a trenchless or ‘no-dig’ technique which can be implemented with minimal disruption to traffic, commerce and the environment. With pipe bursting, excavation is limited to a launch and a reception pit. Once the existing pipe has been isolated – i.e. it is no longer active – steel rods are inserted along the pipe from the launch pit. When the rod reaches the reception pit, a cutting head and expansion device are fitted and the new polyethylene pipe attached. The rods are then pulled back towards the launch pit and the existing pipe is ‘burst’ and displaced into the soil allowing the new pipe to be pulled through.

Pipe bursting is not limited to simply replacing the existing pipe with one of the same bore size, it is regularly used to install a larger pipe then the old one thereby increasing the capacity of the system.