Buderus Manual on Trenchless Installation of Ductile Cast ... - Duktus

1. Introduction
Introduction
When the infrastructure of our present-day towns and cities was being created and
developed, the typical feature of the construction sites was large numbers of men to do
the work. Trenches for laying pipes were excavated by hand, the pipes were lowered
into the trenches without any mechanical lifting gear and vast amounts of sand and backfill
material were shovelled in by hand. The most widely used material for the pipes was cast
iron and the joints between them were sealed with hanks of hemp and poured lead.
Today, after more than 100 to 120 years, the networks of pipes that were laid at the
time need to be rehabilitated and replaced. In those town and city streets where once
upon a time there was plenty of space for pedestrians to stroll and elegant carriages to
drive, there are now several lanes of dense motor traffic and kerbs that are blocked by
parked cars, which means that delivery vehicles often double-park and cause further
disruptions to the traffic. If the rehabilitation or replacement work on the existing
network of pipes had to be done in conventional open-cut trenches in this case, the
general interference with traffic would become almost total and it would be the
community that had to suffer the additional costs of delays, exhaust and noise emissions
and loss of retail income caused by the obstruction to public travel.
It was therefore only logical for the first steps in the development of trenchless pipe
installation techniques to be taken, as long as 30 years ago, in the densely populated
areas of industrial towns, initially for the renovation or relaying of sewer pipes, which are
generally situated on the lowest tier of the layers of pipes below the surface. Developers
then transferred their attention more and more to the renovation and rehabilitation of
drinking water and gas pipelines. A sector of industry devoted to trenchless installation
grew up, with its own special machinery, installation techniques, technical rules and
standards and of course, not least, its own pipes, which had to be suitable for these
trenchless installation techniques.
Over the past ten years, <strong>Buderus</strong> Giesserei Wetzlar GmbH, with its ductile cast iron
pipe, has made a crucial and impressive contribution to these developments and it is the
story of this contribution that the present manual wishes to tell. The intention is also to
describe the present state of the art, or in other words what installation techniques the
ductile cast iron pipe can be used for, what are the performance features that it has and
who are some of the satisfied customers who have put its ability to perform to the test.
Wetzlar, June 2008