Status Assessment, Ageing, Lifetime Prediction and Asset Management of District Heating Pipes

Today District Heating (DH) utilities have to work on status assessments and lifetime predictions while many pipes in the DH systems are close to the expected service lifetime according to the design criteria. Consequently, they have to think about suitable maintenance strategies. Additionally, they must also work on the transformation of their DH systems towards the increased use of renewable energy sources.
Because the ageing of DH pipes consists of several different processes the results of available lifetime prediction models show a large variation, so that reliable predictions require many researchers working on this topic. Therefore, researchers started an international research collaboration platform under the supervision of IEA DHC, where the experience of international researchers and research results from national research projects are being compiled and consolidated. The overall goals of the annex task shared 6 “Status assessment, ageing, lifetime prediction and asset management of district heating pipes” are to improve existing methodology of accelerated ageing, lifetime prediction, status assessment and asset management of district heating pipeline systems to provide district heating companies with valuable knowledge on how to treat their pipe network optimally. Besides the tasks to improve the knowledge of ageing processes and lifetime prediction, there is a need to revise the current standards to gain more realistic results. Asset management tools based on this enable utilities to develop targeted strategies for decarbonizing district heating systems in addition to predictive maintenance. The TS 6 project as well as the scientific approach are presented in this contribution.