Modelling the long-term sustainability impacts of coordination policies for urban infrastructure rehabilitation.

Due to structural and hydraulic deterioration, urban water pipe networks have annual rehabilitation needs. Worldwide, these needs are often significantly larger than the actual amount of rehabilitation being performed, leading to increased risks of serious failures, lower performance and a growing techno-financial burden for future generations. It is well accepted that, in order to limit the multiple impacts of utility works in the urban environment, rehabilitation projects should be coordinated between water, transport, energy and telecommunication infrastructures. In practice, such coordination means that public utilities must rehabilitate assets earlier or later than technically needed, in order to engage in joint projects in which digging and resurfacing expenditures are shared. Hence, at the municipal scale, such coordination influences two variables that are key to strategic decision support: average costs (€/metre) for asset rehabilitation, and the service lifetimes of those assets. However, current models for strategic asset management do not enable practitioners to estimate how changes in the coordination process may influence the long-term financial and environmental impacts of infrastructure rehabilitation. The present study aimed at addressing this methodological gap by introducing the concept of a coordination window that quantifies to what extent utilities compromise asset rehabilitation times in order to join multi-utility projects. An algorithm for modelling the influence of the coordination window size on long-term sustainability costs is presented and applied to one Swedish municipality. The results suggested that total capital costs and carbon emissions can be lowered by 34% and 16% with a coordination window of 35 and 25 year, in comparison to the no-coordination case.

Data supporting the life cycle impact assessment and cost evaluation of technical alternatives for providing water and heating services to a suburban development in Gällivare Sweden.

The article presents input data that were used in Pericault et al. (2018) for life cycle impact assessment and total cost assessment of five technical alternatives for heat and water services provision in a suburban development in Sweden. The data consists of a list of environmental impacts (cumulative exergy demand of energy carriers - CExDe, global warming potential - GWP, abiotic depletion potential of elements - ADPE), costs, amortisation periods, lifetimes and output flows of the system processes composing the alternatives. The data was derived from values collected in lifecycle databases, environmental product declarations, scientific publications and personal communications with companies.

A novel freeze protection strategy for shallow buried sewer pipes: temperature modelling and field investigation.

The burial of sewer and water pipes below the maximum ground frost depth can be very costly and laborious in regions with cold winters. If a freeze protection measure is applied, the utility lines can be installed in a shallower trench to reduce the excavation needs. One freeze protection measure, so called heat tracing, consists of supplying heat along the pipes. In this work, the use of 4th generation district heating as a heat tracing solution was investigated at a pilot site in Kiruna, Sweden. The influence of the system on sewer and water pipe temperatures was studied at a snow-free and snow-covered cross section. To this end, five heat tracing temperatures were tested and the corresponding sewer and water pipe temperatures were measured. The field experiment was also simulated with a two dimensional finite volume model. The study showed that, under the climatic conditions of the experiment, a heat tracing temperature of 25 °C allowed prevention of freezing of the pipes while keeping drinking water pipes in a safe temperature range at both cross sections. The other main result was that the developed finite volume model of the sections showed a good fitting to the experimental data.